Three Poems

It is like when you do not say it, like when no one does,
and a shadow draws over the grass fields.

It is like when the opus or the song that saved you
is moving towards its resolution,
and that is all you hear,
and blackness draws over the grass fields.

And night arrives as we walk
towards the cold heaps of compost
and the zero-point stares at you
and a fox with a wounded eye
stares at you with his good one

*

You can grope about for the shape of deceit.
Deceit is something done, more severe, glaring,
than the disappointment spreading around it.
Standing just next to disappointment, grief melds
so that only a shadow can be seen--

disappointment strikes out at deceit like
huge, grey wings of
inadequacy, grief then
like the fire-blanket of the breathless,
restraining, in the end,
every dream of flight.

*

Imagine that so much burns in the rain

And what about bull-headed experiments far away at the border, where someone stirs, in a stiff, high-standing collar? We know nothing. We saw none of it. We bent down over the children, you know, that was the most important thing- that, with nervous faces, we bent down over them, most of all to see if they were there, and then to see if they were actually scratched by evil-doers. We sat then with them by the fires, peered into the fires and marveled how they burned, despite the jets of rain.

Translated by GSW