The rise of the eyes Poem by Christian Lehnert

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‘,
that is to say puppet, since they mirror, as it were,
a small image of the person gazing into them?

(Plato, Alcibiades)


For now we see through a glass,
darkly; but then face to face.

(1 Corinthians, 13:12)


From the holes which the westerly tore into the fog
shone beams of black light. He who saw the void

forgot about it, and to search where the night closed up
was pointless: morning, a plasma sucking time dry. The day

drips over the mountains, apparition of an unfinished
lake, stone furrows, hazy mirror. Did an eye gaze up,

already cut up and blurred by the wind,
to a point which lost itself in so many possible

worlds? Did the rain devise shapes on the water
which searched for names: cell star, orbis, sperm?

Nothing yet elucidated why a mind can grasp you:
swelling nucleus and its negated death, rippling stillness.

Translated by Hans-Christian Oeser & Gabriel Rosenstock