Esther Kinsky
Pokladnaja 32
A foreign land. In summer.
Pale light.
The breath of a slow sea,
a far field
the grinding sound
of words said in vain.A candle: piercing and blue.
A child that dances,
spins and turns and bends
and bows in time
to an empty songand never says a word.
A far land.
Foreign, endless, flat.
A sky of tin, arching low,
the horizon a darkening edge,
a ring circling my dream,
the hollow core.Shadows come and go and linger.
Days break and lie
unlived
at the edge of the picture
which is half question and half answer
and is withering fastI am not here
nor there, am child and candle,
shadow
night and sea,
a drifter in the air
that rises from the clefts between the words,
white spaceThe law of dreams
One finds and loses, travels
from place to place in no man’s lands,
and between stone and shadow – tamarinds! –
one meets oneself in a dead person’s
disappearing trace
Translated by Martin Chalmers
Page(s) 189-190
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