Piegaran Windows* Poem by Jürgen Nendza

I


Pliable. The card thistle patrols the side of the path,
but is unable to tease open the material,

not then, not today. So further
inquiries about the vegetation: evergreen, scrub

between flowers and wounds, from which memory
begins completion, and evacuates

the present to the undergrowth for a story
of resistance, for example, which runs

through the vocabulary, opposite the hill and up
to the Roman village, where in quotation

we see the Temple of Diana, and with each word
a labyrinth in which time loses itself

before it lays at our feet chicory,
cartridges.

II


Cartridges. The dusk has been a firing range
once more. But now the ground is free:

the dogs are sleeping behind the holm oaks,
from whose trunks we collect stag beetles,

and from dead wood legends of fiery flight. The heat
tightens its corset, obstructs gorse lights,

brushwood bark, hill and valley: a verticality
deserted by the wind. Well organized

ants take the measurement of our feet,
and your voice, like evasive action, charts

another horizon. In the vanishing point lies the artistry
of birds that leads us on to the view of a swallow

low over the pool: the play of ripples reflected
on its white breast. That´s how the water flies away,

you say lightly, sinking hills all round us,
legends.

III


Legends. I think of the moats in English
gardens. Their bound breadth impassable,

and just a short step to the spaces between
words. Once again, themes of distance

open up their patterns so close by: the swallowtail
lays its half-moon in the curve of your brows,

tells of the arched span of filigree lunettes. Later
back home, you lean in the door frame waiting. A figure

between coming and going, looking down
at the petrified river: drying light that fades

salt and threatens to tinge every movement in arrest.
Then princes set up their courts on the hilltops,

arcadian scenes, fairytale pictures in the silver of the olive´s
tonal values.

IV


Tonal values. Long ago Vannucci´s colours freed themselves
from their themes, they wander about or explore

doubt. We chew on rosemary bread. You talk about
the heyday of the Piegaran glassmakers,

while your words slip on the sanding
of my jaw, and the goldfinches begin their song

of the morning that falls fragmented, half asleep
through the cypress columns, while the church

bell begins to gnaw thinly at the signal sounds
of contractors´ reversing trucks in the valley

and repeats the time tenfold in the time. To wake up
behind Piegaran glass, I think, while you are

still saying: used for the cathedral windows at
Orvieto.

V


Orvieto. An afternoon in the catacombs. Tuff,
china clay, the passageway freezers are stacked

with deadlines. On arrival Etruscan water
still flows beneath the pigeonholes among

the ten thousands cooings of the storeroom
for the base above, which pronounces

against heretics in a miracle of blood. We go on deck
on volcanic rock. A ship of chalk, basalt,

as though the Arabian beauty had come,
and we admire Signorelli´s love of the details

of hateful human nature, while
outside on the screens is continued

the anatomy of attacks: in Genoa,
we see, prisoners are being taken

between thought and speech,
the dead.



VI


The dead. The landscape seems to have been
left behind. The earth beside the road ripped open.

Cable drums, communicating trenches. For a moment
you don´t know, if it´s a jam or a procession that´s pushed

engines together. We turn off into the late sunshine.
In the park cypresses, gymnospermous evergreens,

flaming crowns. Your shadow is walking ahead of you now.
Its metronome silent, and along the lines of the body

salmon coloured the deposit of desire. We arch
the night, the room, the window open. Later

from the hill opposite headlights full on skin the snaking
road, and we see each other again in a renaissance

of light, shared out between flowers and wounds, so
pliable.

Translated by Richard Martin