Tour de trance my task, she said, was poisoning time Poem by Monika Rinck

how everything turned, repeated, expanded
and rotated, heat was a space so vast,
so disastrously large, was an arena
in which the wreckage of objects drifted,
savage impacts in the distance, no one heard,
everyone felt, the pulsing aftershocks.
where something was missing, it all got bigger,
turned, rotated, lurched about
and then came to rest in the centre.
fatigue was a cure, the weight
of the atmosphere, hallucinogenic heaviness
cushioned, it was turning less now,
as if the impacts, in their very substance,
were subject to dilution, as if
time, torrential space, were being precisely and
tenderly poisoned, the chemical weakness
rising in its fabric, frothing, suffocating,
the accumulated white layer of
crusts becoming richer, the impacts
fading into toxic noise, it turns,
turns imperceptibly, and stops.


taken from: Monika Rinck, to refrain from embracing
trans. Nicholas Grindell (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2011)