Leaf-fall Bornholm I
A bay and a chestnut make up the carthorse pair.
I can’t jump on, but must grin and bear.
Leaf-fall Bornholm I
A warm German wind, a few
degrees under zero, mutely upright
the barriers between existence,
being and life. Language forest
in the squares of grey fences (antirust
paint, red, among varnishes).
Deeply vision digresses, mounts
trains that go north, to the sea
and beech woods of many-bayed islands,
screeches, murmurs, green haze.
I had seen it once. Now,
in the upwind, stale city leaf
of a fruit-tree, sooty branch,
yellow derived from blackness, moist,
pale my favourite shade, the aster’s
mauve quite cold in fire, motionless.
The wind rises, away from the east
as a phenomenon, continental, lifts
the bright things, hold back still, ramified
a tint with no origin, like tones,
poetry on the birth of man:
over the rails, free of frost towards
the city, whistling yelling,
concaving outward where ice holds and
stinks and derides (Eternal Nature).
The leap over the fence that was,
hesitation of concrete white, cream cheese,
shadowless and antibabylonian
towering, light electric, the
brighter for so clearly despising
us. The bashed-in panes then
of the station where no train
halts (when bashed-in, whose
blood rose sparkling into his eyes
and throbbed in his temples: too
visible, too feeble, just from the body,
not enough height), but upwind,
vanishing. To the other side then
leaf falls on leaf in nutritious death,
the humus
of a West Berlin allotment garden.
Translated by Michael Hamburger
Page(s) 74-5
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