Pitch & Screen Poem by Lutz Seiler

what blew at us from large peopled trees
was originally deepened
into the time of conversations, tree language
was baumkuchen and lay
heavily at home, like a rested bone which
as we children often shouted before your time
had been away, which had paced the fields

and breathed on them, which we now
knew how to praise long and eagerly and saw
that even father liked it, called it
a memory prop, a signal tower
of his heart and the seeds
of barely common footsteps, of track-laying
vehicles, of ores and oils, broken away

from the lodgings of his ambling, far beyond
the dams of culmitzsch, dragged away
from a rare job near selingstädt
with russian ores and oils, and although
we ourselves should long have gone to sleep
we crowded down towards mother when father walked about
at night and screamed
the bone the white that was the bones
with russian oils and ores
thus we said to ourselves, he divined the ore, it is the bone, yes

he had climbed the slagheaps
had known the mines, the caterpillar drive, the water, the schnapps
thus he slid homewards, inventor of overburden
we could hear it ticking, it is the watch, it is
his geiger counter heart

Translated by Hans-Christian Oeser & Gabriel Rosenstock