FromThe Transient Poem by Dirk van Bastelaere

Heart, I can consider you in generous terms

of imagery to prove your transferable

nature, your utility, Generator,
for the reclamation of unreclaimed land;
reservoir for the felt

or what in touch with our mortality
emits signals in biochemistry.

As a cistern for the emotions,
that which moves us, I could incorporate
you in the rhetoric
of the preceding, but, as rhetoric,
the preceding has already done so
and as such incorporated me, so that I
address myself from the transient in you
that reinvents me in what you do to me

Translation by John Irons