Anneke Brassinga

The shining mist already outlines shadows.
We pull up the water right to our chins
like sheets, so ripplingly cool and fresh-starched,
...

No entrance with flourishes needed to occur.
Of a vanishing point no one knew. Everything just
swiftly got smaller in the calmly spread-out realm
...

What on earth are we doing here, we do not
ask ourselves as long as the jigging of tunes
keeps coming from the speaker cabinets, hanging
...

sea like a mirror
scaly ripples, no
foam -
...

God almighty, I'd be well shot of you.
I love you not, nor do I love the word,
the now made flesh, well-kneaded, tender-simmered
...

If with shawms, gullet-pipe and loud warbling
the struck-up tuneful tumult praising our
anguished existence gets lost in the foulness,
...

Behind the waterfall, roaming across rustling fields,
crouched above liverwort, springing from cliffs

at springtide; you used to see them everywhere,
...

Palmgracht's colonnade, a heaven-reef the cloud shore
reaching out to, distantly oncoming, an evening sea
whose mother-of-pearl I tinged with my fiery glow now
...

If every instant's an obscure beginning
of aftermath that only after centuries
will shed light upon this now -
...

1
No more than with the stones and the grass
or yonder blown-off hat
can there be prattle with your alabaster flesh
...

The wind weighs the words
and finds them too light
the wind weeps, sweeps the words
aside, out of sight
...

A roomful of empty shoes, yet
from all of them she rises, resurrecting in
her many forms: the one and only, vanished,
...

Do I dare disturb the universe? What a question,
for one of those ancient women gathering
fuel in vacant lots. There is no returning,
...