Tiina Aleman 

Übersetzer:in

Desert dogs run through my dreams,
light, fast, and silent,
just like the wind of God;
beautiful and regal, night after night
wildly they bound.

I smell it, naturally I smell it:
my heart is their prey.

How could I ever feel fulfilled,
if I didn`t run until I was spent;
if I didn`t run night after night, didn`t race
with the phantom, alien
desert dogs.

Bitter and scarce is the northern light.
The sledge here is drawn by heavy shadows,
the owls and wolves keep watch.
A word crunches between the teeth.

I don`t know, I don`t know how to be here,
I am chilled by history.
All borders are cages,
all stories are locked.

What I`m talking about, is
the dance of dust mote
in the immeasurable sun.

The scalpel and the metronome
on my father’s piano
kept a silence between them,
when I was a child.

Only now, with time,
have I begun to hear,
understand
their strange stories.

They delicately carve time.

Blazing, unmoving sun
over the isle of death,
the white stone house of Time.

They say it´s where
eternal treasure dwells,
and if they say it,
it must be true.

On the table is a jug,
next to it a glass.

Whoever drinks from it forgets
their name and
loses their shape,

transforms into a grain of sand on the ground
on the blinding beach of the isle of death.

A seaside house
always feels like it is a ship,
just landed.

Every night it goes wandering
across endless oceans,
eras, expanses.

Around it drift the stars,
in its heart weeps the hearth,
that no one kindles.

As a dog yearns for his master,
so a house by the sea
waits for its captain.

That which is can be expressed
in another language,
that we forget at birth.

Sometimes a few words still come back -
for instance when walking on the beach
without a thought, without a care,
without a single penny...

The pebbles speak it, slowly,
but completely without accent.