for as long as a heaven-ward glance, to be lighter
than the wind, elevators gleamed, the finest traces
of cotton, like needles on the seam of vapour and ice,
trailing through the atmosphere, but even as a child
one learned to read: pilots, inside the jabs for
cholera and reservoirs in the shape of ballpoint pens,
passengers whose excrement falls like stones through air
holes, tanks, but the line of the horizon was
a few degrees darker and the zodiac, conceived of
from the end, a nocturnal experience with empty spaces,
remnants of pigments in video text, as a cause of various
new fevers, in my dreams the earth was flattened
like a disc, slanting, but the instruments determined
most precisely the puncture, no disquiet, just a tiny
hole, since I, too, had remained without a trace at all,
in the dissolving fog, in an unknown place

Translated by Hans-Christian Oeser & Gabriel Rosenstock