Four Poems

borderlands

their borderlines knotted a string
of snares and transgressions.
in the annals of division the boundary was inscribed
as victor. in wartime, the border strip
swung back and forth, villages
went astray, slid to
the periphery. their inhabitants
sealed their throats with crude locks,
stood watch over the silent crime scene
that i enter light-heartedly. often, followed by
their eyes, i took the armored path to a
neighboring land, to hear of earlier days,
when fences still lined the pastures
and a kindred echo bound
all the names. where a road once ran
its trace disappears. all is margin
and forgetting and transition.


carantania ( iv)

when the germinating language had fully budded,
embayed, serrated, winged, feathered,
and its grammar seemed etched into alphabet,
when, through stories recounted, enemies were banished to sea,
to the forest, to the cities and people
spoke of unity, realized they were a gem
in the ground plan of Europe, a branch on the bough
of their languages, their rival came as neighbor and seemed
more familiar in his dealings, friendlier
than their giants, the ajdi, who had always raged
on the mountain tops. he came to evaluate, to
count them, but found their number hardly worth
much. fewer, without protective power,
its speakers immediately hurled spear-sentences at
the majority. lanceolate, fired into the airy land,
scorched. lined up, bridled, the small nation’s
cavalry stood, in the full
dress of their embattled, forbidden language,
armed for a fractious battle.
only their misgivings kept their word.


house of love

the house that shelters me breathes imperceptibly.
has a timbered roof that billows like a sail,
has an outer layer that is not rigid. you hear
me living inside it, you ask what i’m doing,
grumble when i remain silent and weep. in the house
of love, everyone builds their own little cottage,
one for themselves and another for a third.
i will no longer give in to persuasion. my ribs
have congealed into a fan vault
that barricades me in. you can hardly
detect me, i’m so distant from you.
at night, my old desire makes a racket
deep in the keel. I float inwards, where love
couples with the foreign, to the cape
of hope, my throat taut.


translation

is there a zone of darkness between all languages,
a black river that swallows words
and stories and transforms them?
here sentences must disrobe,
begin to roam, learn to swim,
not lose the memory that nests in
their bodies, a secret nucleus.
will the columbine’s blue be a shade of violet
when it reaches the other side,
and the red bee balm become a pear, cinnamon-sweet?
will my tench be missing a fin
in the light of this new language? will it have to learn
to crawl or to walk upright?
does language know how to draw another toward it
or only how to turn the other one away? can each word,
then, risk the transit, believe itself
invulnerable, dipped in pitch and hard as steel?

Translated from the German by Tess Lewis.

Poems originally appeared in distant transit (Archipelago Books, 2022). Reprinted by permission of Archipelago Books.