Gerhard Falkner Poems

Barefoot I walk in front of the Deutsche Bank
and speak of the ribbed man—
the ribbed man surprises in the morning
before a plot full of bones
...

my first beloved
is not named laura and not liliana
she doesn't dance and doesn't sleep and isn't alive
she does not resemble god
...

a stranger I awakened and early
the plug still plugged in
a woman, smaller than a horse
handed me an apple in English:
...

you sleep and lie next to your hair
your white leg is propped up
and i, on whom it rests, i am the world
made glum by your sleep, am the danger
...

Aphrodite, at whose command animals couple
her thighs like those of the finest Attic stallions
and dressed in robes as if sprayed with Botticelli
...

Only the breast and quiver reveal the god Apollo
a torso that marble only makes more naked
the arm, fractured like the shaft of a lance
...

Never again has a body come into light
like that which Artemis, rising
from the right into the tumult of battle
...

The hand has been repaired. An arm is missing its shoulder
A knee drives suspended in itself. Everything is
impulse. Even the gaps work
A god comes onstage and, lo
...

Stunning
the way one merges into the other
how there a god persists with the head of a bull
and there an arm−still warm
...

I must have eaten from the spheres
they must have been bitter -
or evil
they had holes that sounded like sighs
...