then you'd see this squatting body under
the archway, crooked fingers dug into his forehead,
craters driven into his skull by frost, a
leather vessel scorched by inspiration, filled with
dust, who, singing in the sun, meant something like
the harmony of the spheres, ether of unstructured noises
reminiscent of steel axes, from the beginning high-pitched blows,
until you were here, as though a person entirely
dreamed up would make you less frail beneath the
ancestral mask of that alien language which never falls silent,
the fluent paradigms of scree on the porous
lips of the dunes, when you listened under your pale
habit to that murmuring like prayers reduced
to breath, to the sucking of the wind on the wart-like pupils
of the rocks, a motionless gecko peered at the detritus
as if in your face which vaguely remembers whom?

(charnel-house, st catherine's, sinai)

Translated by Hans-Christian Oeser & Gabriel Rosenstock