1
With hanging gardens,
a lama monastery.
Painted battle scenes.
•
Wall of hopelessness . . .
The doves flutter to and fro.
They have no faces.
•
Thoughts standing still, like
the colored mosaic stones in
the palace courtyard.
•
On the balcony
I stand in a cage of sun-
beams—like a rainbow.
•
Humming in the mist.
A fishing boat far from land
—trophy on the waves.
•
Glittering cities:
song, stories, mathematics—
but with a difference.
2
Stag in blazing sun.
The flies sew, sew, fasten that
shadow to the ground.
3
A chill-to-the-bone
wind flows through the house tonight—
names of the demons.
•
Gaunt tousled pine trees
on the same tragic moorland.
Always and always.
•
Borne by the darkness.
I met an immense shadow
in a pair of eyes.
•
The November sun—
my enormous shadow swims
becomes a mirage.
•
Those milestones, always
on their way somewhere. Listen
—a stock dove calling.
•
Death stoops over me.
I’m a problem in chess. He
has the solution.
4
The sun disappears.
The tugboat looks on with its
face of a bulldog.
•
On a rocky ledge
the crack in the charmed cliff shows.
The dream an iceberg.
•
Working up the slopes
in open sunlight—the goats
that foraged on fire.
5
And blueweed, blueweed
keeps rising from the asphalt.
It’s like a beggar.
•
The darkening leaves
in autumn are as precious
as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
6
Sitting on a shelf
in the library of fools
the sermons untouched.
•
Come out of the swamp!
Sheatfish tremble with laughter
when the pine strikes twelve.
•
My happiness swelled
in those Pomeranian
swamps and the frogs sang.
•
He writes, writes, and writes . . .
Glue floated in the canals.
On the Styx, that barge.
•
Go, quiet as a shower
and meet the whispering leaves.
Hear the Kremlin’s bell!
7
Perplexing forest
where God lives without money.
The walls were shining.
•
Encroaching shadows . . .
We are astray in the woods
in the mushroom clan.
•
Black-and-white magpie
stubbornly running zigzag
right across the fields.
•
See how I’m sitting
like a punt pulled up on land.
Here I am happy.
•
The avenues trot
in a harness of sunbeams.
Did someone call out?
8
The grass is rising—
his face is a runic stone
raised in memory.
•
Here’s a dark picture.
Poverty painted over,
flowers in prison dress.
9
When the hour is here
the blind wind will come to rest
against the façades.
•
I’ve been in that place—
all over a whitewashed wall
the flies crowd and crowd.
•
Here where the sun burned . . .
a mast holding a black sail
from long long ago.
•
Hold on, nightingale!
Out of the depths it’s growing—
we are in disguise.
10
Death leans forward and
writes on the ocean surface.
While the church breathes gold.
•
Something has happened.
The moon filled the room with light.
God knew about it.
•
The roof broke apart
and the dead man can see me
can see me. That face.
•
Hear the swish of rain.
To reach right into it I
whisper a secret.
•
Station-platform scene.
What unpredictable calm—
it’s the inner voice.
11
A revelation.
The long-standing apple tree.
The sea is close by.
•
The sea is a wall.
I can hear the gulls screaming—
they’re waving at us.
•
God’s wind in the back.
The shot that comes soundlessly—
a much-too-long dream.
•
Ash-colored silence.
The blue giant passes by.
Cool breeze from the sea.
•
A wind vast and slow
from the ocean’s library.
Here’s where I can rest.
•
Birds in human shape.
The apple trees in blossom.
The great enigma.