Monika Rinck

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock, it's by no means certain
that what's clear's always light, it might equally darken itself
with high-power exegesis, but without forfeiting any of its clarity.
The way it is for fishes. Who can see the difference but not
...

how everything turned, repeated, expanded
and rotated, heat was a space so vast,
so disastrously large, was an arena
in which the wreckage of objects drifted,
...

we shall inject you a substance into
fixed on this bench in this vacation home
look here, how your brow is shining
...

it's only a few degrees, just five
or seven, by which the scorching city
increases in heat, in semantic drift, haitiesque,
a tunis perhaps, floating towards the equator,
...

a slope, no, a great plain,
gentle hills, arched upward, i see a downward slope,
a stretching, acquiescing, an arc.
everything must be green and an obliging olive grove
...

been and gone - but it had been summer
the sun all binary now
had left where it had left.
from sunday on becoming cooler but
...

her avid pony eyes under straggly darting brows:
this look of hers petrifies blossoms, the sky to stone,
lapis l'azur. in broadband vision, what's red
becomes reefs, corals, circled by fishy waiters,
...

says he: grief is a pond.
says i: yes, grief is a pond.
because grief lies in a hollow,
reeking and shot through with fish.
...

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock, black, gleaming, trained.
The beast does what you want and does it well, so well you almost
believe it wants it itselt - how you want it's what it, too, wants.
We suspect it of pride. But will it ever be able to take on board
...

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock, with room-filling voices,
but without me seeing the room they fill. I'm in the hypnosis tent.
A gentle draught, trembling wavering lengths that soon fall still
from top to bottom once more, like opaque colours, orange,
...

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock, in amber & ambergris:
delightfully (or frightfully?) the weasel couples in the thicket
with the cylinder head gasket, tubes, fan belts, twitching parts.
How fleet the weasel is, how heavy the very braked car wreck
...

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock, hair, hours, greed,
fireballs, the dump was ablaze. Space weapons plummeted,
unchecked, like icing sugar into hotels with indoor pools. I saw
the stud farms in the lowlands fall victim to random marauders,
...

Hark! Hear how honey chronicles mock. A half world of blue light.
Is it air or wall? Mute birds, decoy thrushes, nay sparrows,
captured in resin and hardener, cast in see-through cubes.
Makes you want to cry. Or chirrup and hop in lieu of bird.
...

honest like the horse
between my knees
(Johnny Cash)
...

tapirs are complex minions of diligence.
the way they go about on low-down legs
with their much too dainty hooves -
parading penumbral beasts, that send
...

the bright day is late, but still light
no fibre paths between zero and one
save the pull linking shoulder to tendon
...

supplementary desire takes place when
ever desire itself adds that which
even fulfilment, if it existed, would lack.
when the unknown meshes with the absolute
...

the white light in the streets
bundles the city and in the park
above the paths where summer's burned
stand sails of smoke.
...

in all phases of the nesting fold the tuft,
balled-up packages, dense, tight and mute
crouched in buds the press to fat
muddled centres in purple and/or white
...

an obstinate disciple, so youthful
but the one whom jesus loved
who laid beside him at the last
...