Uljana Wolf Poems

oh the skein of raggle-taggle village dogs: trickly
tails, stubbly legs, tough teeth fletching at the fence

yours is the street, the dust on an asphalt hem
yours the resonant night in the dormant valley
...

you mean it would be a sin not to mention the swans here. sex is silence, love—uh—seeping. at the end blips remain to be seen: a flag, a fling. we winged it! maybe not sensible, but without fairy tales, longer hair/langour/longueur of sense. death sentence. off from that i see the specter's bird lid: how it shoves sideways before the lens. which was to be proven: one can throb for everything, the eyes don't fall out of the head, the stillness, even after the worst flattening blows, could move the nothing: not not not not. in its end, its bedeutung. signed, hölderling.

Variation/alternate translation by Traver Pam Dick (previously unpublished)
...

we wanted to speak about little animals, to get on our knees for the little beasts, those made of dust and gooey fuzzle, in floorboards and cracks, shivering in grey coats, our animals made of thin air. we wanted to whisper very closely in your language and inside mine, tell me darling, did you vacuum today. no, we didn't wish to alarm our creatures, little like spots, are they spots, don't they have pompom tails, bunny ears, or bunny tails, tom-tom ears, didn't we want to smoke less, cough less, be less either or. yesterday the room's nook was lonely in its dreary croak. today it's a hoard, for tender hordes, un pont, we want, so let's be quiet, let's eavesdrop on our knees: our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-grey names.
...

we wanted to lean over this phrase like a charted city, to make a point, create a mouthspace, myth of hear or say: hier, in this net of tongues, one path was well-sprung, a mistake, mystique. lingua franca stuck on our foreheads, almost touching and already legend: you are here, ich bin wer, a game of routes, but whatever we said the words did not arrive. instead the red lines snapped, rolling back into their very own names: murmuring with the greek one, chartis, carta with the italian, and karte with me, meaning my card: looks like we're here. almost true freunde. and so we found, with the wrong sign, our site, and the rest of the city we folded, in the manner of this country, as they say, into maps.
...

winter came, stretched its frames,

wove misty threads into the damp



wood. fogged windows, we didn't

recognise each other by our arms



which were too big, too baggy, all

borrowed onesies, into which we would grow, if they fitted us,



which, eventually, they will. would.

a verb like the sound of sleeves over



wet glass. like wet sleeves in a mouth,

sucking. through the frames we saw



snow portraits of mothers in parks,

wind-ruffled, on the verge of, but held



by ribbons, which led to hats, in der

mitte of gloves. saw the supply-threads



of winter, linty. and tested our roles,

tentatively, along the midlines of mittens.
...

what is a domicile? a domicile is a star-

crossed ten of clubs. what is a crossing?



in the flubbed dialect of these forests

a crossing is the word tree. and why



do homelands play cards in the air? no one

ever saw the homelands go home. a tree



in the forest of neighbouring languages

is a club in this suit. out of its wood



someone makes crosses on a map.

the countries fill in their domicile and



put the stationery back into its pencil

case. what is stationary? put it back.



with nelly sachs
...

I

girl
your clothes
you fell
in the dunes

the sand
you lay out
in tongues

and between
your legs
nautical miles
anchor



II

the sky
a drunken
sailor
whose eye's
been gouged out

in murk
the white pearl

you sleep
with the cyclops
...

aperture on october
window to courtyard:

biggest photo wallpaper
you ever sat facing

pigeons on roofedge
with clay feet

on god's conveyor belt
standing still

no wingpair none
whose beat reaches you

an old photo
in overexposed wind
...

we weave ourselves
between the
stations

gravel
and stems

on the switches
splinted kisses

against the train's
clattering on
...

as if you'd
sent your
lungs

a word
coughs
in a coffer

and the lock
balks at
the key

as if it were
your stubborn
mouth
...