This has to do with the beauty
of staying at home on one's own for a few days:
Summer's approaching its deadlines,
and I watch an ordinary bird
keeping to the lilies like a humming bird.
It's late afternoon, a damp air lies
over this fragile neighbourhood,
and I myself am responsible for the shadows
I cast. In the light there gleams the single
wing of a dragonfly -
its former body still clinging
to the stalk above the water.
This is the house of former poems,
the house of imperilled new ones.

translated by Hans-Christian Oeser and Gabriel Rosenstock