1.

Many were here, but they left again.
Only a few extras
still stand around, forlorn, in the parking lot.
Perhaps they never existed, yet I know
they'll come back one day, just as November
always comes back. We know the season
and into our nostrils rises a cold smell of iron
heralding its arrival

glassy afternoons in vibrating apartments
with mirrors mounted on doors, reflecting themselves
and other mirrors beyond them, painted white.
A stationary storm. I walk around in there
and the air doesn't hurt me,
doesn't move me, it touches but doesn't move me.
1 stand in there and vibrate,
supplicating, stationary, mirrored.

Not a prayer but a wound,
not a wound but a prayer
that yesterday's clowns will return
for a Special Additional Performance
so one can find out if their suffering is so heart-rending
that it once again causes tears to spatter on the panes
and laughter to move
in piles of dry leaves rife with polio.

So much brick.
I have to smile.
So much brick
to show what we feel, deep down.

2.

Then comes this gray light from the future
and it is terrifying.
The underground carnival continues, a masque
of worms with papier-mâché faces.
Their smiles are only a row of teeth.
Rotting seed pods. They live in them.
Hear their rattles
across the ground under the trees
slowly pulling their darkness over themselves.

Then the procession gathers, detaches itself
and stumps through sleet, tracks and foretells in the snow,
in coffee grounds, a future in black and white, with the black
slowly devouring the white until Spring comes, or death,
with birdsong in the all-white cherry-trees.
Will we be surprised once again
on the outskirts of some divine comedy
where, in awkward bliss and bashful ecstasy,
even the wingless soar
on balmy winds in too diaphanous garments?
Will, in a dance, everything fill with grace,
feet stride on pavements
reborn into a renaissance
in which blood rushes through marble veins?

All want out and into the light. Look at me!
So many! But all we can see is the teeming crowd.
Here they foregather who will become piles of dead leaves
drifting across a cold gray afternoon. A prayer,
the teeming of dry leaves.
Suddenly, they fly up to their branches again
and the trees take a bow.
The prompter goes on whispering unused lines.
But it's all over, everybody has gone home,
everybody but one.
He sees the brown leaves rise.
He thinks he is dreaming.
He is dreaming.

3.

We've forgotten the clowns, it all started with them;
but over time, purity of heart has become less significant.
They hide in the crowd. They are safe there.
Hardly anyone knows what they look like
when their tristesse no longer smiles
its nose-bleed-colored smile.
When tears have washed away all the greasepaint
there remains only an embittered schoolteacher
convulsively clutching the edge of a desk
in a dead man's grip.
It was all a dream about feelings, amplified
to a cock's crow in some broken language.
Who is still interested in climbing, rung by rung,
up to a moon made of glass?
And yet the procession moves on
in the night that lets us see all.

They walk their sleep, walk it back here,
the sound of tin whistles fills ro o ms, walk dawns
to slake the lime, switch off the lamps.
The small jar contains the daylight,
the large one all the tears wept on their graves.
No wind but the ashes of an ocean.
The question is not where to but past and the answers:
to recognize this ocean in small puddles
and to let it billow in "no wind,"
to chase off the dog that is chewing its own bone
and to wake the sleepwalker
on the ever-receding shore of waves of rooftiles.

Translated by: Anselm Hollo