Return of Ecstasy, 
- Return of Ecstasy, and Doubts about Trams, and Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen
Return of Ecstasy
As a tree. Face to face we are quite calm. The tree. So this is the world. Sky, birds, grass. So many fingers for your cherries. Do you love me? Quick. What do we look like again, we ants? I’m called fence. Jump over me. It’s preciously small as a mouse. Mouse. Maize. Help me against him who mows me. Help, the sky is pressing me into this stream. Blue thought. Where are my feet if I am water and have none? Why fish? As a fish beneath the sky? Do you still love me? Was the sky once precious? Once was, once was. Jump over it. What is a tree? A tree is a mouse-leg of the sky. In, under, for it. As a forest many weathers pass you by. I am called weather with streams as liquid feet. Feet. Who are these feet bound for? How quick we are. The mouse is a tree with speed. Preciously loved and as a sky once and therefore the birds. The bird who understands me. The weather is a tree above the precious world. To keep speaking with the language is not at all easy here. Quick to fall in love. Many are . . . How forgetful I am. Already I am eating an apple. I the apple am being eaten. One often has to say du. I have learned to say du. Kissing is also a way to kiss. For what do we know? Is nose a stupid word? Where the sky once was it has been. I am now speaking very alone. One nose per person. Face to face we are quite calm. Onrush of fish. I am the tree and the fish. The small tree. The maize to the weather on high: what do I look like? Eye look here. [End Page 48]
Doubts about Trams
You talk to me and it isn’t talking. You give me your hand, which is not a hand. A cloud must be passing. We are too light. I tie my laces and I am crazy. I verge on the moon, which means less than anything else. Sundays I steal newspapers from good automats. I cannot always be eating ice cream, taking trams, cleaning my glasses, ringing doorbells. Trousers. I am saying hello as a clothed neighbor but the world can turn the head dark inside. Inside there is no window, outside I am crazy again etc. Tram: here I am a paid-up pedestrian, having cleaned my glasses. The trouserless tram is my automatic neighbor. It isn’t me who is ringing the bell. I am still talking about you. And where there’s no window I must be with no window. I cannot always be eating ice cream if always is always. What has time done to your hand? The unwindowed world can become more windowless still. Dread was not always like this. [End Page 49]
Zakid’s Delicatessen, Bremen
The apple tree hangs full of issues my child has issues and I have them, such issues huge problems, or pompoms hard problems dead persons and field flowers the wars too are hard foreign fields we take some pomme-bombing the apples falling hard then hardly softly pommelling the earth they do not conquer I am not in therapy or a territory clonk bop thump plop [End Page 50]
Peter Waterhouse, born in 1956 in Berlin to an Austrian mother and British father, has lived in Vienna since 1975. He studied English and German at the University of Vienna, where he completed a doctorate on the poetry of Paul Celan. He is the recipient of the country’s highest literary honor, the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2012). In addition to novels, plays, and essays, he has published half a dozen books of poetry. He is also a translator from English and Italian, and the co-founder of the Viennese translation movement Versatorium, whose collective translations of Charles Bernstein won the City of Münster Prize for International Poetry (2015).
Iain Galbraith...
