Erik Lindner
Erik Lindner Poems
1. All that is born can disappear.
How on a boiling day a low bench
receives shade from seven olive trees.
...
Till a sail of the windmill comes loose
Ivens waits on a chair for the wind
till the tip of a dune hollow crumbles
for the wind on a chair waits Ivens
...
The sea's purple at Piraeus.
A flag creeps over the bell tower
when the wind turns.
...
Off the coast the diver rests in his story
and sparsely draws the cliff behind the beach.
The wind cuts the story and wears and rubs
...
In the storm soon to come
the road will become impassable
barriers close behind us
...
This layout fits somehow in
this house left swept clean
after the loft extension
...
When I walk to the sea
I can go two ways
- two ends of a line
she follows the words past her index finger
...
1. What matters is just that it's somehow right
the chance to be a component, to belong
to a company, a collection. People
who get changed between the low hedges
...
Do not doubt that reason,
that reason, that reason, that reason.
A fly walks from the edge
to the centre of the table top
...
When I can escape my words no longer
or his voice that robs them of force, sounds, the
child is cut out
...
A man eats an apple in the park
and the trees bend around him
the grass has flooded from the trunks
it crowds round his feet
...
1. She knows how to wear a coat as a dress
while sitting she perches
on the toes of her shoes
...
The sea shattered and all your hands could do
was keep scooping like mechanical diggers
each shovelful you tipped slid back to your feet
...
A flag creeps out of the campanile
when the wind turns.
A man steps over a dog.
A woman stoops to rub her eyelid.
...
A stairway leads into the sea
a wave breaks across a step
a ship pulling against its chains
...
1. Don't start doubting reason,
reason, reason, reason.
A fly walks from the rim
to the middle of the table-top
...
1. Birds tilt at millsails
no longer whirling
barking by the houseboats
chains drag through the gravel
...
Erik Lindner Biography
Erik Lindner was born on May 3, 1968 in The Hague, the Netherlands. When he turned fourteen he left secondary school and worked, amongst others, as a tutor of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy for The Arts. Lindner made his début in 1996 with Tramontane. From 1998 till 2003 Lindner was attached to the Institut Néerlandais in Paris as a freelance programmer. He has read his work to audiences since 1984 and was a guest at various international festivals. He published four books of poetry and a novel. In 2012 he was stipendiat of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of DAAD. Translated books appeared in French, German and Italian. Also, individual poems of Lindner have already been translated into Chinese, English, Macedonian and Turkiish.)
The Best Poem Of Erik Lindner
18 September 1994
1. All that is born can disappear.
How on a boiling day a low bench
receives shade from seven olive trees.
How one's bottom goes clammy in contact
with massive and age-old stone.
How the tramontana breaks the sea's plane
and through penetrating light of a lazy sun
picks up and twirls the water's surface
in hurricanes yellow, blue, ochre, sand, water.
Vertigo can dissolve, directionless.
Swallows that dive like bats do
along the steep cliff behind the bench
where the path winds its way through three bays
but still points only to France.
2. Nothing dies willingly in Port Bou.
The girl from Aragon on the beach
takes her skirt off and lopes like an antilope
through the surf while her leather bag
holds a writing case with ironwork.
She's here only for this Sunday
that is like a nameless history.
An empty pedestal on a steel plateau.
Front garden of desolate customs post.
A rock that almost slides into the sea.
Give it designations colourblind
play of tramontana, wind as strong
as lofty mountains, makes you shiver in the sun.
3. All that is born can disappear.
The free provision of penicillin
and morphine. In the old pension room
two beds stand between a wall
of disease. You and I, who is the male one?
What is being a male? The scraping
of a blade across an inflamed throat,
how it feels to be shaved
one last time, for a party
you won't attend. Or how
a child laughing throws sand
at the sun. Falling and no
shame till you rise again.
4. All that is not born can also disappear.
Sand, roots, helm grass, tracks that never
ran here. The inhabitants who gaze after
the traveller but do not give his description.
Their gait still disturbed after the building
of a monument. Now, as the tramontana
licks at your body and picks up you and your glasses,
carries them along. Where the passage brings
the churchyard to the edge of the abyss above the surf.
Details of it only the short-sighted can find.
How it got here? Fifty years ago. To for-
get such a thing is barbaric. Even the defacing
of an artwork is a cultural expression.
I did this. Unscrupulous. Today. Date.
Translated into English by Paul Vincent
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