A Sign from Elsewhere, and: Different as Hansin and Erwin, and: A Dictionary Is, and: Hello Jürgen Becker, and: A Rhyme on Ever, and: * * *
- A Sign from Elsewhere, and: Different as Hansin and Erwin, and: A Dictionary Is, and: Hello Jürgen Becker, and: A Rhyme on Ever, and: * * *
A Sign from Elsewhere
My imaginary mother from time to time utters a high note a sign of deeply sated life
But it’s deceptive she is no more she is
a soprano since she emigrated
(with greetings to Franz Hodjak, 28 Feb. ’94) [End Page 115]
Different as Hansin and Erwin
When I reach my spot in the park and, getting off my bicycle, think: “Today the birches are luminous” (for they shine out of their surroundings)
it is an attempt—no: my usual exercise—to enter into the just now “potentially present” puzzle of language and: sketch in it.
The sentence “Today the birches are luminous,” never mind that it’s only the trunks that are luminous, would indicate completely different “findings” or “facts” on another planet. [End Page 116]
A Dictionary Is
after all only inferred from the sounding of sound-existence, hence a rather approximate (somewhat, respectively) piano. [End Page 117]
Hello Jürgen Becker
A buzzard-I, sailing, pulls together, overlaps views. I follow. A palimpsest is neither composition nor life. I-projection, for the buzzard flies in the “vertex,” as we mathematicians said when we still existed. [End Page 118]
A Rhyme on Ever
The bushes, the bushes, the brambles, the clumps of wild roses and round sloes have torn our gaze forever into bushes, brambles, roses and sloes [End Page 119]
* * *
Morning dawns at the balcony door. It was never clear: did it come from the world or was the world here?
Strange, the question has a village-outline: construction—here, vastness: world.
But would not be asked in the country. Is therefore a city question. In a city the city is never the world.
At best a preventive measure. [End Page 120]
Elke Erb grew up in the former East Germany and lives in Berlin. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of poems, most recently Das Hündle kam weiter auf drein [The Dog Managed on Three], published on the occasion of her receiving the Ernst Jandl Prize in 2013. A selection of her early poems in English translation, Mountains in Berlin, is available from Burning Deck.
Rosmarie Waldrop’s most recent book of poetry is Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010). Her novels, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and A Form / of Taking / It All, are out from Northwestern University Press; her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), from University of Alabama Press; and her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, from Wesleyan University Press. She translates German and French poetry (Elke Erb, Friederike Mayröcker, Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud) and co-edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop.
