Rabbits Poem by Monika Rinck

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,
with a voice passing through, interconnecting the sections.
It tells me what I am: I'm relaxed. Thus I lie alone in sound
and listen, I'm a pack of rabbits that have stopped scurrying.
Intervening in the soul's dynamics: what's associated, inhibit,
and what's lately dissociated, re-associate. Changing cubicle.
But what do I clandestinely shed, what comes loose or snags?
Since images are not able to pass unharmed like a voice
through the pores of things, I'm blind rabbits, we're relaxed.
Meanwhile, the hypnotist in lace stockings walks about invisibly
and with muffled footfalls on the thick carpet between the cubicles.
Black-barked thighs, as if something were crawling concertedly
over them, like a voiced Z, buzzing, textured. I think: rabbits.
I'm relaxed, I have failed. Rabbits, rabbits, always rabbits.

Translated by Nicholas Grindell