Thursday, July 6, 2017

ERNST MEISTER ~









Still to

tell, still to

tell . . . my

memory

asks me, and I

stare at it.



Am I alive?

I ask my room, —

I ask

the space in the expanse

and lastly:

Are you, space,

what I know?



-



When we're

stripped right

down to

clay, then

the talk of

what's singable

is right.



The man who is born,

thought through to the end —

it echoes back.



-



Many

have no language.



Were I not myself

replete with misery, I



would not

move my tongue.




-


If we would once again

be given eyes

after some time

in the corpse, in death . . .



As we made love,

you examined

my cranium

very closely.




-


Look into the opened hand.

Departure

keeps showing up there.



A sound is present

and doesn't end

against the edges of the hills.




-


At the end of days,

what kind

of stammering will come

from mankind's mouth,



when difficulty

becomes a cripple,

if anything at all,

and the heavens' coldness

freezes the acts over.



Language formally,

this romance,

when the song already

lost its head.




-


Someday,

when the last ones

are doing well for themselves

above the ashes,



when love

is the most blind

since the times, when those

who themselves forgot,

children of untimed,

are completely forgotten . . .



we — you all

in the unstoppable

starry

misfortune.




-


Think, in the

quintillionth year

you won't

be allowed to be homesick

for person and Earth.



THIS, that you

were a child

of the universe,

is gone,

and where



is the unholy one,

the mother with her

wits about her,

and where

the star that shone for us?



I'm reeling.



I also wished,

before it ended, I'd see

a dream.


-




Wisdom, the idle wise,

might even a cut go

sharply across the eyes.



Unable —

all that love and guilt, all

that honor.



Also never to be ashamed,

as on days that

taste good.





———————————————

Ernst Meister
Of Entirety Say the Sentence
Wave Books
translated from the German by
Graham Foust, Samuel Frederick