Hysteresis Poem by Katharina Schultens

Is there still some landscape we may flatten out?
Do things endlessly progress towards some distant singularity?
bit by bit stripped back towards the radioactive core?

Who sits helpless at the control-desk as commands buzz overhead?
What special needs, what interests, are here being pursued?
Is there an ulterior plan? a last ditch bid for influence?
some blindly-led stampede around the ocean's inner rim?

Lines of coding lick towards the cliff-tops; out
of the submerged maw, lodged under the withered fig.
Rows of long white teeth, tall needles, flash
like ever spinning newsreels, running
loop on loop around the distant ring of coast.
-
The blueprint of this crisis is elastic. It expands,
forms a net; the small catastrophe: enmeshed. Those little
silver fishes, writhing, wriggling on the deck. Their vicious kiss.

The potent shoot of some restorative herb
is winged our way; though which wings
will be liquidated first? The birds
that skim the sea-foam: atomised.
How-high must tsunami rise before
they cease to be no more than paddle-pools?
-
Are not all the oceans one construct of flexible steel
upon which rigid millions
swerve their sloops through charted orbitals?

Who now fits the bridle round his boat
and gambles on sails as on a horse's mane?

Who raises tissue-paper-banners, only to jab
a lance-tip through the heart of the controls?
-
Have we a primal claim to riddling?
exclaiming what we should have asked outright.
Was our initial stake secured
with more than mono-filamented thread?

Have we received the gross returns from such smugness?
peeled the wet cagoule from our pre-bought enlightenment?

Each pressure-point: no more than a groove,
a notch along the length of the measuring-stick.
Falls of black light make visible the blink
of warning alarms. Skin-inked graduations through which
we negotiate the staunchly patriotic frame of mind. While
your aura stays trapped; cannot be allowed out to play.
-
Who are those people that we meet through sleep?
And was it me who denied the crowd - just enough
to keep my distance from the group?

Do you stand yourself at the tip of the monster's tail?
teeter over years of indecision? Have we wasted
all that time? given that the monster's now long dead.

Translated by J.O. Morgan