I
Eyelashes rustle, your look drifts beneath
thin ice. Daylight crouches above us.
We get up and neither knows which face
will waken with them. The window is a huge garden.
Silence opens in the air, and sleep
still glows, is warm, is coloured with apples.
The morning turns with the earth, and a blackbird
hops through your first sentences: that's how trust grows
in the repetition that forgets you. The light
tells us we're awake. We get up. Time
is unreachable between breaths. And this feeling
for your hand when the sentences lose the way.
II
Every Day the edge of memory shifts
and what we wanted to say: the apple
doesn't know that time recites us. In our hands
a huge lake sweats, and the world
begins again as fine as a whisper
over the garden gate, like a spider's web
that hangs up a centre in the air, lying in wait
for a connection. We think ourselves in sequences
the table laid, and when silence opens,
in the street love goes to the baker's
dumb as a deer. A shiver crosses the wallpaper.
What´s difficult now is the blackbird.
III
Footsteps above us. A different story walks
overhead and you sort yourself out for a while
with mirror, towel, comb. The water flows
the same as yesterday when the water flowed.
You turn it off, in the sink the hairline crack has grown.
In the kitchen the toaster sizzles as though wasps
were flying into a baker's heating spiral. The light lies
powdery soft on your eyes and silence glows
along the white tiles like a frozen lake,
cracks running through its centre, faster
than a bird flies. There's a smell of warm bread.
The ice on your skin begins to sing.
IV
A Smile waits outside in the branches
which doesn't know you, and turns
in trees. Are you awake? The light
is weightless. It pulls the morning
further and further into the apple, a reality
quite without arms and legs. To look at it holds you
tightly to it and what you wanted to say yesterday,
perhaps the day before. For breakfast rain words
drop in. Who'll take down the washing
when syllables open up under drumfire
and you sit down? The silence clicks shut.
Your smile, a handful of rice.
V
The apple is a dictionary when it falls
from the tree. You open it, and hold butterflies
in your hands which are like garden gates. Only these
fingers lie exactly on the entry threshold
and like a knife between life erect and death.
The light reveals itself heedless and still,
the blackbird knows a song. Where are you
right now, beside me, with your apple cut open?
Soon it'll rain. Your dress dances
on the clothes line and flows in the wind, flows
like a river to the sea. I immerse my hands
in it as though these fingers had never existed.
VI
Leaves fall, feathers, and what do
the corpuscles say, the red and the white?
A shiver goes around as it does every day,
always something is being looked for. We read
ourselves with our hands, open our eyes, sorted out
in the lights, and we shut them. I scrape
with my eyelashes. We could have slept in the open,
under the shadow of the blackbird's flight, so unlined
the table once stood, which wasn't one, in shivers
and in grass. The room pricks up its ears,
silence bangs the doors; you come in, your hands
full of lakes on which leaves float.
VII
Our own Breath stands roundabout us
by the door to the garden. We step into the rain
open its shirt: the air behind lies like
naked skin on the branches. It's damp
and wet, the landscape threads your voice.
Droplets arch together with sky and lake.
In every word the earth turns, and you don't know
how it looks at you beneath the noise of your tread
from out of your footprints, filled with subjunctives
and with sand. The centre shines, the multiplication
tables march ahead of us. I repeat: a man
and a woman and a blackbird are one.
VIII
We meet inside the apple, tell each other stories
in its house where small blackbirds ripen
and wait for a tree that will turn with
the earth; which we'll recite and drink,
because we are thirsty: a whole ocean
is silent within us like the fruit itself
is silent inside the apple, as silence in stillness
is silent and enquires; and with its yes
inside it wears white like a bride. We are the ones
who shop in the centre of town. After breakfast
the window is a shelf. We get up, we put
things away. We are the ones. We are not.
Translated by Richard Martin