Ulrich Koch 

Übersetzer:in

         (Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Leelanau County, Michigan)

                                   1.

The backstory’s always of hardship, isn’t it?
                        No-other-choices and hoping-for-better
            on foreign shores. A minute ago, as measured

by the sand dunes here, the shipping lanes were thick
                        with them, from Hamburg, Limerick, towns
            along the Oslofjord, and lucky to have found

the work. The Michigan woodlands hadn’t been denuded yet
                        (a minute ago) so one of the routes was
            lumber and the other tapped a prairie’s worth

of corn. There’s a sort of cushioned ignorance that comes
                        of being born-and-then-allowed-to-live-in-
            safety so I used to think it must have been more

forgiving here, less brutal than the brutal North Atlantic
                        with its fathoms and its ice. But no.
            The winds, the reefs, the something-to-do-with-

narrower-troughs-between-the-waves and lakes like this
                        are deadlier than oceans: in
            a single year the weather claimed one in every

four. We come for the scale of it: waters without
                        a limit the eye can apprehend and – could
            there be some mistake? – aren’t salt. Dunes                                    

that dwarf pretension which if falsely consoling is right and
                        good. Where commerce lifts its sleeping head.
            If I had the lungs for diving I expect I’d be there

too among the broken ribs and keels. Visitors need
                        a place to sleep and something to fill up the
            evenings, it’s natural, the people in town

need jobs. Calamity-turned-profit in tranquility. My
                        father’s father’s father was among the ones
            who did not drown. Who sold his ship
                        
and bought a farm.

                                   2.        

What is it about the likes of us? Who cannot take it in
                        until the body of a single Syrian three-
            year-old lies face down on the water’s edge? Or this

week’s child who, pulled from the rubble, wipes
                        with the back and then the heel of his small
            left hand (this time we have a video too) the blood

congealing near his eye then wipes (this is a problem,
                        you can see him thinking Where?) the hand
            on the chair where the medic has put him.

So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn
                        hearts. In alternative newsfeeds I am
            cautioned (there is history, there is such a thing

as bias) that to see is not to understand. Which (yes, I know,
                        the poster child, the ad space, my consent-
            to-be-governed by traffic in arms) is true and quite

beside the point. The boy on the beach, foreshortened
                        in the photograph, looks smaller than
            his nearly three years would make him, which

contributes to the poignancy. The waves have combed his
                        dark hair smooth. The water on the shingle, in-
            different to aftermath, shines.

                                   3.

There was once, says the legend, a wind-borne fire or as
                        some will recount it a famine and
            a mother bear with her two cubs was driven

into the lake. They swam for many hours until the
                        smaller of the cubs began to weaken and,
            despite all the mother could do, was drowned,

then the second cub also, so when the mother reached
                        the shore which then as now betokened
            a land of plenty she lay down with her face

to the shimmering span whose other side was quite
                        beyond her powers of return. The islands
            we call Manitou, the one and then the other, are

her cubs, she can see them, we go to them now by ferry.
                        We are not
            the people to whom the legend belongs.

                                   4.        

And even on my city block. There has always been suffering,
                        both little and large. But does it
            compare to mine? Yours is nothing.

I saw the woman running. I heard her scream.
                        You did nothing.
            She said please she said help me we all stood still.

You all stood still. It took us a minute to figure it out,
                        by then they were down
            the street. And then? The men were on bikes,

I didn’t think that happened here. That wasn’t
                        my question. Whatever
            they’d taken had made her quite desperate, I’ve

never heard a scream like that. Then you? Then we
                        went on with our evening.

                                   5.

Stroke of the pen. 16:42 on a Friday. Say you were
                        already in the air.
            You’ve given away your blankets, your
tent, you thought you’d seen the last of camps. Or say
                        it was your buddy from
            the 82^nd Airborne: interpreter, ally,

engineer. Targeted twice because of what he did
                        for you. His papers are no good now,
            your promises were lies. Detrimental, says

the president. Malicious intent. Says, only those
                        who love us. That’s
            your favorite part.
           
                                   6. 

If a spirit – call him Manitou – takes pity on a
                        family of bears or, more
            to the point, if humans imagine they share

the earth with bears who are worthy of pity and
                        a cognizant spirit however
            remote has pity to spare, why then

why then a sand dune may be more than sifted
                        silica. The wind goes on with its
            sorting, the lake bed cradles its dead.

But part of the language the glacier used
                        to speak to the sculpted substrate will
            include this bit of sediment.

We didn’t mean to fail you. We were here.

            Night. Or what

                                   they have of it at altitude
like this, and filtered
                        air, what was

in my lungs just an hour ago is now
                        in yours,
                                   there’s only so much air to go

            around. They’re making
more people, my father would say,
                       
                        but nobody’s making more land.
                                               When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,                          

                        they invented a game whose logic
            largely escaped me –
                                    something to do with the
                       
                                               disposition
of bubbles and plastic ducks – until
            I asked them what they called it. They

                        were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
            Keeping the ducks alive, I think,

                                   was what you were supposed to
                                               contrive, as long
            as you could make it last.  Up here
                                  
                        in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of heat, in costly
                                   cubic feet of steerage we’re
                        a long

            held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
                        than human breath could manage. In

                                               the third age, says the story, they
            divided up the earth. And that was when
                        the goddess turned away from them.