Today I saw two dolphins in the ocean
close to the shore
I followed them for a while
their graceful bodies sliding
into holes between the waves
rising and falling
like two lovers
joining oceans
You phoned me from Frankfurt once
I had never heard your voice so full
A dark flock of swallows
I saw birds too
pecking through the silver scales
of a fish, stranded in death
light taking flight in resurrection
something dark sucks on the lips of the living
the birds leave without learning to love
Somewhere other than the ocean or the sky
No touching
In the nights
between the earth and the flickering stars
your eyes taught me things
that I had never known before
In Lavra we drank a Bock each
and I felt the gaze of your body
and later the earth above me
You do not have to know where you are
There is an unfathomable silence
The pavement of your soul circles
the moon endlessly, if you sit in the same place
the same worn stone forever
you will always know where you are
The dress you wore
coming in the night from
the restaurant with a great tree in the courtyard
it made the soft sound of butterfly wings
falling into tears
No hands
Do you remember Lorca? In the market
he listened to white limbs flapping like fish
on marble - divining the pleasures of water, the wet
skin of oceans and rivers parting, always
either what is or what is not, never expecting to
say what will happen. Only that you might arrive
and peel away the layers of possibilities. Loosen reason.
Make love, in oblivion to all but forbidden intimacies
In shared remorse
In the permissible taboo of dreaming
We lay down in the mirror of ourselves
We become more than we were
That will never leave me
It is much more than your pink dress
My love, it is the beauty you couldn't see
Not even now as you feel yourself waking
As you bend over your books in the window
It always preceded you, surrounded you, a veil
over your being, a fugitive wind from the Caminho
I should have taken you to the hut at the edge of a village
and woken with you early to walk in a faraway forest
There is so much emptiness now
Only trees left to count
I am drawn now to only empty places
where we can feel motionless
When you make love
do not look outside
at all the silver things
You sit and watch me eat
I had never seen your eyes so full
Do you know Ulrich? A Man Without
Qualities. In his modest chateau he exists endlessly
- dampened and made wretched by the mist of probabilities, by
the intentions of a forlorn God, the purposeful flesh of a faint melancholic heart.
A life diminished by everything known.
The first time you kissed me
in a side street
in your blue car
Which are we? The possibility of either this or that,
of nothing, of burning, of voices you hear in
the canals of your bones, screaming to be heard
before drowning.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem