The eyes, rivers and grass—
To each one’s inclination:
The dying off, the dirt.
House, that bears the imprint of a door, you,
as a wrapped packet in a word chest, the dear sweet boy,
the off that he owns.
Plus
gloriously
empty of language:
You are—a real human being
A crow in the airspace;
You, little man, are one man—
You are a man, who disbands
and offs your own briefcase
by means of black coffee
or salt
or sunshine.
Lunchbreak.
Then: off.
One holds off two seconds ...
Then one goes home—to a garden
which is different from the year before last.
One often stands in front of it
as if still waiting around for something other at last.
Matthias Göritz is the author of three volumes of poetry—Loops (2001), Pools (2006), and Tools (2012)—and three novels: The Short Dream of Jakob Voss (2005, winner of the Hamburg Literature Prize, Radio Bavaria Prize and the Mara Cassens Prize), Dreamers and Sinners (2013, winner of the Robert Gernhardt Fiction Prize), and Parker (2018). He currently teaches as the William Gass Fellow in the Comp Lit Department at Washington University in St. Louis.
Translator Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems—including A Doll For Throwing, Louise in Love, The Last Two Seconds, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—and a translation of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
