The important history / would be of silences

Your body a whole day, long, getting / longer, falling through the inner / distance

dream a flock of starlings between / my legs. Are you the shifting mass / or am I?

In life goes, / and out, air to the chest’s throne. / Her ribs shape not a cage but a fence.

In you, the autumn's knowing ardor holds / The gold and amber lying at its root.

I have felt / her fist / stay strong / in my ribs, / known it / was love

clues I can be what you need / me to be: water-rich, able / to sustain your breathing.

Tell him how sails resemble angel wings, / but show him the danger of sailing

She is fertile with water. She is ripe with god and sea oats.

how he came to be oppressed or granted / free range as if dominion wasn't his to begin with

morning is ripe with new springs popping / down the mountainside, streaking it with thaw.

Perhaps you have to have the right kind of thirst / to keep yourself inside your body.

almost home: / above and beyond / the Jemez, hoofprint clouds

a thin song / drifts like a wood scent, burned leaves, / from some past I can’t place

Sleep is what this longs for, what her shoulders / spell out, runes smoother than sandstone

the world touching a thought // a funnel of naked . . .

when the wind blows / I’ll know direction is just another way / of saying come home.

Poem translated from the German by Anatoly Kudryavitsky and Yulia Kudryavitskaya.

listen to ceiling opening / to sky, a blue such as you’ve never tasted