Remote resemblances
Hand-carried through these years
Without registered mail

The snake says:

What

A sign-language of initials
carved from your name

When

Questions trimmed to size
A vocabulary short-circuit
Fricative bushes

Millionfold overlapping con-
Stellations
Hungry indefatigable dance-happy

No agreement
On Tetra-packing the Milky Way
An undivided routine
Mine and between us

Left behind
In this windy city
I watched stars falling
On a screen
Perhaps an attempt
To catch the lost net with a fish

I tumbled out of my family tree
Umbilical cable ripped
Birth begets birth
Motherhood is an exaggeration

And where now?

Insomniac windows
In a game each riddle has a rigorous solution
Shaped like an iron

Place-names are sedentary
They live in the nowhere-paper

Transmission!
Airtime fills my ears
But postpones the moment of address

First thing after reincarnation
Have a look in the mailbox
Then dash back
Into the book’s hybridity

A written garden
A falling-silent upon the bridge of enumeration
The absence of geese
The roman candles of their feet
Authors trapped behind the bars
Of autographs
One cheerful step up from
where you stand – clairvoyant

Our strange perambulations
Through an eyeless village
No monument here
Fleetingly it appears
In a flash
All alone
Until now

Writing
Into the arms of repetition
The repetition of
Your words




____

Translator’s note: In German, quotation marks are colloquially referred to as “little geese feet” (Gänsefüßchen).