Apple and Blackbird Poem by Jürgen Nendza

I

Eyelashes rustle, your look drifts beneath

thin ice. Daylight crouches above us.



We get up and neither knows which face

will waken with them. The window is a huge garden.



Silence opens in the air, and sleep

still glows, is warm, is coloured with apples.



The morning turns with the earth, and a blackbird

hops through your first sentences: that's how trust grows



in the repetition that forgets you. The light

tells us we're awake. We get up. Time



is unreachable between breaths. And this feeling

for your hand when the sentences lose the way.



II

Every Day the edge of memory shifts

and what we wanted to say: the apple



doesn't know that time recites us. In our hands

a huge lake sweats, and the world



begins again as fine as a whisper

over the garden gate, like a spider's web



that hangs up a centre in the air, lying in wait

for a connection. We think ourselves in sequences



the table laid, and when silence opens,

in the street love goes to the baker's



dumb as a deer. A shiver crosses the wallpaper.

What´s difficult now is the blackbird.



III

Footsteps above us. A different story walks

overhead and you sort yourself out for a while



with mirror, towel, comb. The water flows

the same as yesterday when the water flowed.



You turn it off, in the sink the hairline crack has grown.

In the kitchen the toaster sizzles as though wasps



were flying into a baker's heating spiral. The light lies

powdery soft on your eyes and silence glows



along the white tiles like a frozen lake,

cracks running through its centre, faster



than a bird flies. There's a smell of warm bread.

The ice on your skin begins to sing.



IV

A Smile waits outside in the branches

which doesn't know you, and turns



in trees. Are you awake? The light

is weightless. It pulls the morning



further and further into the apple, a reality

quite without arms and legs. To look at it holds you



tightly to it and what you wanted to say yesterday,

perhaps the day before. For breakfast rain words



drop in. Who'll take down the washing

when syllables open up under drumfire



and you sit down? The silence clicks shut.

Your smile, a handful of rice.

V

The apple is a dictionary when it falls

from the tree. You open it, and hold butterflies



in your hands which are like garden gates. Only these

fingers lie exactly on the entry threshold



and like a knife between life erect and death.

The light reveals itself heedless and still,



the blackbird knows a song. Where are you

right now, beside me, with your apple cut open?



Soon it'll rain. Your dress dances

on the clothes line and flows in the wind, flows



like a river to the sea. I immerse my hands

in it as though these fingers had never existed.



VI

Leaves fall, feathers, and what do

the corpuscles say, the red and the white?



A shiver goes around as it does every day,

always something is being looked for. We read



ourselves with our hands, open our eyes, sorted out

in the lights, and we shut them. I scrape



with my eyelashes. We could have slept in the open,

under the shadow of the blackbird's flight, so unlined



the table once stood, which wasn't one, in shivers

and in grass. The room pricks up its ears,



silence bangs the doors; you come in, your hands

full of lakes on which leaves float.



VII

Our own Breath stands roundabout us

by the door to the garden. We step into the rain



open its shirt: the air behind lies like

naked skin on the branches. It's damp



and wet, the landscape threads your voice.

Droplets arch together with sky and lake.



In every word the earth turns, and you don't know

how it looks at you beneath the noise of your tread



from out of your footprints, filled with subjunctives

and with sand. The centre shines, the multiplication



tables march ahead of us. I repeat: a man

and a woman and a blackbird are one.



VIII

We meet inside the apple, tell each other stories

in its house where small blackbirds ripen



and wait for a tree that will turn with

the earth; which we'll recite and drink,



because we are thirsty: a whole ocean

is silent within us like the fruit itself



is silent inside the apple, as silence in stillness

is silent and enquires; and with its yes



inside it wears white like a bride. We are the ones

who shop in the centre of town. After breakfast



the window is a shelf. We get up, we put

things away. We are the ones. We are not.



Translated by Richard Martin