Your heart goes out cold in cold into a cold world.
Scales on shoulders, like an amphibian we can lurch,
unusually tired animal. A warming riddle,
how much time will pass before the stories
have been solved. Road, roof, thin man in street,
Little wood made of so much sound. HUMAN,
HERE, is that more than a place, a destination?
Spray it on the façade. Who lived six cold and damp years
hardly kept warm as a caudate, who was kept young by fungi,
smoke, tubelike, took away the nervousness, the times of the day
snowed past, dark, bright, who found somewhere to stay
in transition and got eyes?

Translated by Hans-Christian Oeser & Gabriel Rosenstock