Christian Lehnert

then you'd see this squatting body under
the archway, crooked fingers dug into his forehead,
craters driven into his skull by frost, a
...

hundreds of gnats and midges buzzed around
the flames, starving insects swarmed, as restless
as my pulse, from cracks in the earth, from bony
backs glassy wings grew, how it teemed
...

this is the story of
the embryo's fear,
what he had been, recurring over
and over again, a downward glance
...

for as long as a heaven-ward glance, to be lighter
than the wind, elevators gleamed, the finest traces
of cotton, like needles on the seam of vapour and ice,
trailing through the atmosphere, but even as a child
...

cancelled grey tickets from an era long
gone, the writing paper like a palimpsest over
the undeciphered text of sawn-up tree trunks,
a plumbline, a round stone with blood-red
...

nativitas, this word like drifting sounds
of high-pitched bells would fit precisely above the
worm-eaten wood, the gentle breeze of the hills
imprinted in wax, surrounding the hollow in which
...

Have you not noticed that when someone gazes into
someone else's eye his own countenance shows itself
in the orb of the other as in a mirror,
which is why we also call the orb ‚pupil‘,
...

Lift your quill to your lips: is it moving? Are there thermals
wafting or are you breathing, ever more reticent over the shimmering

gorge? Nests of withered grass, nests of
softened fish bones - the circling of the eagles, for hours
...

Over karst gaps, overgrown, clad in dripping oilcloth
I clamber wall after wall into a dark luminescence: through

gorges, deeper than the gaze of those to follow can ever
penetrate, a shepherd roamed this way and that, dug caves, his head
...

In a star's halo of light, in the shadow cast by
my language, I walk across a dark mirror,

lagoons, ponds of salt water that cannot drain
away, focussed on no perspective. I see
...