La defense Poem by Monika Rinck

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,

the desperation, my dear, I see
how the belt, contentment, the bag
slices into your shoulder, which is white,
shiny and never quite dry, a streak

across the contented sky, so high or higher,
axes defend height against width,
slice routes into what has been crossed, anchor
the hysterical jetty far into the suburbs

you sense the desperation, you sense
what the contented sense, the forum
is large, it is even larger, it fills up
with people, the lift, the axes

of traffic-flow directed to the sky,
to the arch, to the diagonal, meanwhile
friends in a hire car are travelling
the wrong way up the feeder road

for the friends, like feelings, have
intensified, they resemble expectation, they are
dialectical temperatures, contentment
and desperation now the same for them.

Translated by Alistair Noon