GREGOR LASCHEN

Translated from the German by Andrew Duncan

Jammerbugt-notes.  Working grounds. Mortal substance


pretty much the end. Wearily the
lava flow goes its way. The old
solid clump, the big
fossil, written to copy
on tatter paper that whistles, rattles
in the wind and now the smoke is rising
from the edges.

*

This hourglass, filled
up with dryness of
bodies; which have 
waited for the melting
of the spaces enclosed 
in us, for the crack.

*

but even, you know, already, glued together
from the ruins over which he walks, he
is walking, at the end, glancing back, naturally forever,
 to the right, out of the picture which
shows him

*

On the north shore, to help the dunes, the
bundles of reedstraw, grass caught in the ice,
driven back with the water by the storm, rolled
onto the tracks covered with 
water: dry life, to help
the dunes, or life. 

*

Asylum practice. Practice
of asylum.

*

The secret life remained
outside the countries, all of them that
meant something to me, crowned with
need and prizes, at home
with every word. The secret life
remained, the return home
didn't.

*

The nomadic, the real ACH! (this too,
already for a long while: on its guard before power. The
poem.) always knew that. Did not
help -

*

Between the stones O.'s clay
head on the sand. Washed up
by the water, apart from treason and
its instruments, the white hands.
But the great rift
and its toneless voices,
time which
rises in the stalks, in
which history has been trickling down since
beginning, they go on talking
about foul consolation.

*

And then, in the middle of life, the declining
surfaces, sweet banks in the other
body, pause points of my self: the
hard alteration of the dream, the blank
years wall beside wall described now
by pain. Outside the flesh.

*

Tongue of union, tongue of manyness. That
already sounds like law, after nature, the
small provisionality, the deviation
of any kind is coming to an end. 

*

Nature sound of two bodies which
interlayered their nakedness to
warm the strange place, each
for itself until the sound
of separation.

*

And the lava field, driven close to the coast, hung
in the watery veil of the spring winds,
a single tree is growing back
hunched over it. None
of the old birds acknowledges it.
 
*

The cripple herd of Man, their bodies
hung about with pieces of sorrow
and wishes go back
on artificial bones
into dereliction.

*

The narrow regions that
alter into dryness, into
floodwater billowing up: to help the dunes,
from here on with the shed skins
of stones.

*

Into where it's grassy, fish.
(Things see, no longer
the sense which was always
forced upon them.) My
dreams go barefoot 
to Cracow. From here on like
the clay in the fold of time, like
this trail with the lagging
foot in the black sand, in the south
of Iceland, the other path
goes into the Rhodope
mountains.

*

In the sea, close to the coast, the little
tulip blossoms grow in heaps, out of which
from now on the gas comes, black
to put the land to sleep, land after land, near
and far off.

*

In the land of union. In
the bloodshot union land on the morning
after the first blows against
the other, the strange.

*

These old butterflies though sheared by the wind,
over the shore, from whose edges - only
in flight - blood
drips, tattooing of the sand
zone for the last decade.

*

The images, the emergency exits
of language.

*

"Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate,…", sung-
out relic, true dereliction. The elite
life, the echo in the writing: "ahi
doglia, ahi pianto./ hai,
pianto. … tanti quai./ ahi", the echo, out
into its long pauses.

*

Over the eastern side the ice climbs up
high, slabs of white-green against
the light, slab capsized over slab.

*

These bleating wolves. //Straight behind it
I come across the real sequence
of images: "The Art of Memory", and the angel
brought on shortly before the end
of the film, high up on the cliffs, after
this stone too was thrown, this stone
thrown…// After this
again the wolves, these bleating wolves.

*

"Every word dies of a heat death" (Edmond Jabès)
Pure literal truth.

*

Grey hardness, ice of dominion.
iron of dominion, soft. All around,
laid voicepipes as
always pointing downwards, a
tumbling going-on-
breathing.

*

The stones are lying
with wounded backs
like
humans, who
aren't loved
any more -

*

"A MEADOW FOR THE EARS", Channel NDR 4 by night in Skagen

"These are natural sounds, today from
a stalactite cave".
"These are natural sounds, recorded
in a forest."

These are natural sounds, from the depth
of the ant-hill.
These are natural sounds, from the middle
of the collision of two cloud-banks.
These are natural sounds: of trees
gasping in the heat.
These are natural sounds: the landing
of snowflakes in summer.
This is the natural sound of two bodies as they
become detached from their nakedness.
This is the sound of the words
natural sounds.

*

But then, but in the morning, the ice-
slabs in their last green run 
onto land, soundlessly
their heart
melts away.

*

The common word speaks
about "colour as
the pain of light", about shame
and the fall before it, speaks
and makes us
anxious. The big black bay
lies there. Under these roofs
of red, Skagen, your rose 
blossoms in the stone.

*

The quarrelsome beauty, the lion is
standing over her, relaxes, for full of tenderness
is how she spreads her
legs, opens her body, taken
with a bite in the throat:

so the figure composition loses
its tension, thousands of years ago, so full
of tension still now.

*

The anchor stone, first bare, later
wrapped in lead, the millstone which the storm
chases out of its skin, and the table, the eating stone,
brother of plants, petrifies
the mirror and the images in it, goes on
living down to the ground. 

*

The shadows out of the
hourglass sound, world
breaks off, world anyhow.
Movements come, the body
stays lying where
it was hit. The head-
shape is amazed.

*

The reactor in Greifswald, the
brothers in Bohemia, a piece further on
Baltikums blodige vinter says
the heading for a while, a piece
away from the oil
on the water and us
again 
a piece of reality.

But distance is something between stars. Who
didn't know: the programme is called
repetition.

*

To recognise the relationship of the white to the sky
and its systems (nomenclature) and
the whiteness of white before this blue.
twentieth century,
meaningless centre, but still very early
edges, on which there is burning.

*

"We are turned round and
round on this world", on
this stillness till the white-headed
shock comes from beneath, to exchange
above and below
into the turning end. The voice
which remained
tells us about it.

*

"Life leaves no
other life a chance if not
the chance of a fragment." (Hans Blumenberg)
Literal truth.

*

The fast disconnections click
soundlessly in the inner spaces: for the
outer spaces the shimmering
of evening, always the same grammar:
pacification of the region.

*

For at Dresden, Rostock, Solingen and
elsewhere not only the paving stone and its price,
the outreach of its hand, turned relatingly and exactly
into the intimate regions of the trajectory, in
the setting of the individual stone,
which - having reached the end - asks after
the handwriting of him who threw it, who
watched it happen

*

Keeping the substantives
together. In the dyke mist
of Eiderstedt in the morning, mobbed together
 the paired eyes of the sheep, a
glow in the white, otherwise
no body.

*

The handwriting on the
wall readable
from here
demanded
from over there
that the wall be torn down. 

*

The suddenly deposited ring in the 
kitchen glass. Numbed shine, the silent
exhibition. In the fridge
the older flesh and outside
the summer, the blooming blue
of the salvia scatters heedlessly
empty shadows into the image.

*

The sparseness made out of words, to be
oneself the obstacle that 
must be razed for a long
life, quenched shine: the
sparseness under the skin of words.
The bay, the mouth, the cry.
The blind spot and the
washed heart.

*

The images, the emergency exits
of my life.

*

Over the balcony that is rotting
downwards, in front of me
swirls the perception of the large
and raw concrete ledge
through Amelisweerd, art-
istically decked with movements of
lead and glass, continuous encounter without touching. Touching
in an emergency. From here on
an image without sound almost, among so much
noise.

*

The bones of birds. The bones of 
big fishes and the bony back
of the turtle, the bones of those
who have the proper name of Nature:

world nailed up with these bones,
nailed up world, nailed up world.
Threefold text of memory, black
on white. The sand, the repetition,
the programme.

*

the blind spot and the heart
washed at the end, it runs down,
the second millennium, this
life in bloody shoes, as
if nothing thought,
nothing written down, nothing
said were there for us. Alien
conceit poem outside
on the edge.

*

Handwriting, sound of nature
out of two bodies,
writing overwritten: that
was possible, for
a while.

*

"Migrant stones": as century-long
sloughs shed
their kernel, substantive stayed.

*

…in this country. The rehearsed movements
of the two isles of the dead in
the new wide space, German dark-
nesses that blacken
each other.

*

At night, this bay
and your body spin, yourself
and the islands outside, to hold
the remaining days
fast.

*

Cloud kernels came with
their hovering fields,
stones came over
the street of water,
cracks came, these tongues
in the ice. Our skin
and its inscription at night,

parted.

*

From the singing, from the shouting, the
pure wantonness of the angels: in this
splash of colour finally out there
on the edge, in the fallout, into the
silence fall
the forms.

*

The euthanasia live
on camera dissolves into
a polyglot
supplement-world the next day:
opinions, talked to death
images far away
from the dying, which was
the business.

*

Thick snow-headedness at the beginning
of the summer: the seasons
change their make-up
and the colour-splash
of our faces runs.

*

Mountains of bones, bonemeal, shavings
and bonecracker*, worn-through             
bonemarrow, artificial bones
in heaps: on artificial props, the
monumental sculpture of connivance
at the end 
of the earth gestures
into empty space.

*

The trees
gasping in the heat stand
blind, no shadow
stands by them.

*

Odessa. Tangier. Jerusalem. Port
Said. Saint Petersburg, Havana, Trieste,
Palermo, Alexandria, Jutland. Sofia.
Istanbul and Copenhagen, Sicily.
Maastricht, Ostende. These names,
which shine over my childhood, and still
do. Casablanca, the Levant, Friuli.

*

The sand running
downwards over the steep wind-heaped dune:
a drop shape
drawn out lengthwise, colour
in colour. The eye
bows before the wind that
goes through this image.

*

The light, after a little while
it lashes out with shadows
and you feel sick at
the older flesh and
your image of it.

*

So the sky falls headlong
into the blue light headed, the
stones say, their skin
turns pale.

*

The hacked-open heart and "because
The passages of life more fierily breathe", what
is mine died away, the speech, itself beautiful,
of this country not
reached with light steps, but fleetingly
re-animated with light steps, there
"brief life" skitters past with the mice.







Skagen, January/February 1991
Utrecht/Hamburg, March-May, 1995

(Jammerbugt:  a bay on the coast of Jutland, facing the North Sea)
(Skagen: town in Jutland)
Baltikums blodige vinter: the Baltic's hard winter (Danish)
*bonecracker: Knochenfrass,a bone rotting disease, possibly osteomyelitis