Lutz Seiler

once founded we are a phloem
on the bark
a guest of the bark & inner child
of the arterial roads. these
...

the steps remembered the dark, the break
between lessons in the woods, the ringing above the staircase, the beatings
that went with the nouns, the mnemonic salt hunched up
...

what blew at us from large peopled trees
was originally deepened
into the time of conversations, tree language
was baumkuchen and lay
...

we were sitting in the jardin du luxembourg. there was
a café under chestnut trees, the chairs
were placed on pebble. there was a breeze and
...

… there were aspen leaves, dry bread, ca-
priciously distributed around the animals' flesh, it was
their fast living which sank at our feet, so we didn't
...

broken hisses & static, bird coughs; to begin, assess
things mentally one last time: the
blue waffle tiling is as it ever was, brown
...

The comrades were good people, they did not complain
About the effort or the thirst or the cold,
They behaved as do the trees and the waves
That accept the wind and the rain
...

here, down where dry moss crackle
is stretched like taut groundcover & your
footsteps knock. something of the upper tree-sway
...

i walked in the snow those nervous
post-war whip lamps in my neck
across the mozart bridge in vienna
where there still hunched on a rope a tired
...

a last colony smell & heavy
action at the chalets: some
hung sleigh-bells, late
returnees' overcoats, at the pockets
...

there were people who
when they coughed covered
all of their face & disappeared: lisa rothe, whatever
we found in her bedside table was enough
for the insect blackness of her feet
...

to breathe, out
& in the breathing went in the plaster boat
of the lamp, we had
its dark, mechanical light, we had alpaka
...

endless sequence of children, screwed
into the echo vaults of hallways, hidden away
when walking, bent into
...