Four Poems

Clay Tablet Bearing the World’s First Alphabet

That had come
much later –

After everything
already had happened –

Without witness
the first stammered

word
this atomic flash

forever
contaminating

the oblivious creation
with spirit

Orpheus

Weightless is
love
eye in eye –

Gods all
spare us the trial
may an impulse
a gaze
across the shoulder
mark its fate

Hallowed Twilight

Since when does your silence have
this gentle S-motion of a Gothic Madonna
who misses her child?

Since when have your shoulders
and loins and breasts
been sprouting
curl after curl
soft and fluffy hair
like in the miracle beckoned by St. Agnes?

The fragrance of linden wood emanates from your skin
invisible angels are carrying you upward
high above my ash-gray hairline –

I want to call upon you
but I stand here immured
by this semi-darkness –

creatures
all sorts of strange ones
and tendrils and leaves
are growing forth
from my mouth of stone

In Bamberg Cathedral

The girl of stone
with the tender locks
and the dress sticking to her skin
(as though she had come in from a sudden
cloudburst)
she is Synagoga –

She has been blindfolded
for she is supposed to be blind to Truth –

This ought to turn into a poem
about pogroms and smoldering ovens –

But I am only able
to think about the musty variété show
where she the psychic could foretell
whatever her assistant was about to pull out
from my pockets with his glowing fingers
on this summer morning –

a return ticket to Munich
a mechanical pencil made by Caran d’Ache
7 euros 38 in small change
and an unfinished love poem

that she is reading to me
sotto voce, syllable by syllable
as though it were
composed for her 

Translations from the German
By Paul-Henri Campbell