3:AM Magazine

By Monika Rinck.

the humours of foliage

1. mystic foliage

silence, no, not rain, a wind, stirs,
pink noise, if i didn’t know what it was
i’d think it the sound of appliances,
like something that only occurs unawares
there are many chummy clumps, cheerful
and up for most anything, in their stirring
they stand and quake, as the trunk stands
and quakes, as they are moved, individuals
wag and nod, many, quaking, the countless
whole as background, the foliage, lie beneath it
and breathe the height, sea of light swells
as if moved by waves, foliage in the fullness
of time. “the day is full when there is
nothing left of the day.” and has to pause
in a fixed stare, innesîn und anehaften,
and no longing for a longing.
“this I like little, this I like littler”, says Meister
Eckhart, “number without number”, mercy flowing
as measureless “as grain or grass or foliage”,
imagine foliage, how it looks, in a fixed stare
it is the eyes alone that shower down
and vanish in the foliage when no one sees them.

2. paralyzed foliage

the foliage swishes in the wind, entertainingly,
or rather: now it baulks and stores away
the wrath of the wind. this is how foliage acts
or allows itself to be acted upon? cooperates,
tears itself open, flails back in a high arc
and – ‘tis passing peculiar – now it stands still.
stands grimly in the wind. sottobosco, lit up,
with devilish intent. so inscrutable, the foliage –
in the standstill of a great force. “give that back!”
the very thought. onrush of horror.
pale green, grey-green, hairy, blunt-tipped soft.
leaf-stem and veins are prickly. interest in grace
is not interest in overpowering. fluffy beneath
and fatter, smoother or glassier, a being of many,
yes so many discrete parts. from my hiding place
i can see how the treetops pulsate from within.
are they not calmed by the light? they are indeed.
completely stilled in the light they don’t stir.
the foliage frozen into the light confides: “i’m
paralyzed. now it’s time for you to hurry home.”

3. external foliage

meseems, Sir, you have a problem with boundaries.
you draw everything inside you. and there you fight it!
the outer world is no longer corrective, the inner world
is thus stretched to extremes. you shiver, Sir, as many parts
of the outer world are colder than you are. you can’t
carry on like this! you see, Sir, take, for instance, foliage,
no, start again: the fact that people disappear, Sir,
shows you that they are external (like foliage)
and not internal (like organs). rumour has it
that all people understand of your rattling fury
is a leafless rustle. you need to get outside, Sir.
and in the park, Sir, you’ll find your lungs anemophilously tickled
by the frost-dried foliage of a budapest hornbeam.

4. ill-timed foliage

wrong, it grieves me so. wrong, it lingers still,
though stricken. how it crackles, ill-timedly – perhaps
with regard to itself. constriction at the edges
makes the centre warp. there’s no time. but it’s in
the offing. when so much happens with no time to record,
then it shouldn’t fall. who says so? whatever. as long as
it’s falling its wagging continues. please, be beseeched, adhere.
then: the stumbling beat of compact conkers. tock. tock.
and tock. captivating, of course. but it all affects
an indistinct sameness that’s sensitive to the same
degree all over. that’s not good. i beg you, give
it time. abide. permit it not before the end
and hold, hold it all, all this ill-timed foliage.

5. future foliage

how to recognize trees in winter – by the buds
on their leafless twigs. do they have scales, half cupped,
or no scales, protected by matted hair? “We can
not name what barely we’ve begun to know.”
as in winter we’ve nothing but what’s to come
to recognize it by. how very fast it all went,
last yellow fronds on spears, all long fallen, having
been ravished by flaring colours, say: the most beautiful
ravished you. left you a shell, or left you behind
as a shell in chill, so shape something, sharpish, but when?
listen: if there’s so little time, there’s little choice
but to relocate memory to the future, postpone
the naming of what barely we’ve begun to know, and not
let a single stirring of a leaf – which today has vanished
(where to?) and which tomorrow will return – go unseen.

to refrain from embracing

you didn’t want to die yet another time,
to collide past each other was your only chance.
for this you had the city, the country, your name,
under which you vanished, to which you felt called.
it was a blanket, spread over you, your eyes
shut, you knew blindly that’s what it had to be.

you heard everything. you wanted to burst. almost
died for the fourth time then. everything stayed
where it lay. thus you entered a world extinguished.
you had to camp there for years. the bed without soil.
the ghastly trough. the stitchless knit. the thing
without style. indoors, the coat. at the seaside, no sea.
the thump of the breakers. their eternally dry beat.

as if there was nothing but the deathly prospect
of having to actually live with this absence of answers.
love calls us to the things of this world, but what calls us
away from them? the horizon’s meaning was lost on you
and you stayed in the distance, soon therein to dwell.

like this love of a hairline, of a trace of fragrance
at the neck, all that’s gone, didn’t stay, became distant.
for this dwelling, too, there was a time. and in this time
there was no other dwelling than this expanding distance.
that was the reason, there had never been any other.

that was the reason, there will never be any other.
and then you lost it, and you lost it again.
except that by then the reason had changed. you did stay,
to lose again, that’s why you stayed. to you it was
no help, but some help it was, it helped reformed mankind.

translated by nicholas grindell
from helle verwirrung, kookbooks 2009

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Monika Rinck was born in Zweibrücken in 1969. She studied religious studies, history and comparative linguistics at the University of Bochum, Berlin’s Free University, and Yale University. She is a poet and essayist, a member of the action group ‘Das Lemma’, and an actress in the fictional docu-soap Le Pingpong d’Amour. She is also the author of begriffsstudio, a work-in-progress on the Internet (a first selection of texts was published in book form in 2001) that “archives and probes the linguistic lapses, intellectual epiphanies, strange and notable word constructions that emerge in the everyday life of the media,” as the literary critic Michael Braun put it.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, March 7th, 2010.