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Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann

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Untitled

Where are they

now? On the yellow writing paper
a few hurried, scribbled

notes, the words like people
who were spilled from the traveling

carnival. We are, both of us,
the curious, the singular

travelers. Now they call to one another
unidentified sounds, happily,

with bright, simple plumage.
So this blue bus drove on and

away. At every stop it left
in waiting rooms a cloud of dust,

which settled slowly, after days,
on upholstered chairs, the tables and

the stone floor. Behind
the steamy windowpanes you see

nobody waiting, none of us. The
stacked automats rust. Their

disguised machinery crumbles like
the empty postcard stands upon

the bar, behind which sleeps
the woman who once, briefly, was

a woman, and stayed behind, her
head propped, a photo, too briefly,

beside the boiling coffee pot. For
five cents anyone can get there,

if there were someone, in the town.
The blue bus, an enormous day,

cloudless, filled with heat, has traveled
on already, and does not repeat

itself. There, into the day, both
of them have gone, enchanted company

of singular persons, both. A
quietness, which

rises out of itself, with doors, to travel
in every direction, and to stop. Both

simply traveled through, and
the past, the pages, both,

is what is simply gone,
to their momentary pleasure

which, changing, endures, slowly,
tenderly, a door: open enough to

remain a secret, empty, which they both
slowly, slowly and precisely, know.

 

Translated by Christopher Middleton

Page(s) 63-64

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