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Sport 40: 2012

PHYSICAL OPTICS VII

page 182

PHYSICAL OPTICS VII

the steel coil of the current stretches from the levee
  to a buoy that strains against the danube
    the river’s balance spring · to the right of the shipping lane

nothing more drifts down · the stick in the muddy
  waves at the bend that sits like a pallet
    on the escape wheel of a swirl is my other marker

for this half hour · from the barrel moored to the riverbed
  to the rowing boat rotted by the rain
    is a line through which the branches of the minutes glide

the trees that have grown with the wind on the towpath
  two then one and then three draw time
    into their intervals · they peg out the frame for the gauge

in this regulating circuit of the gaze · but at the landing stage
  it all comes apart when the pictures get
    too close · under the green of the water

the pendulum slows and swings to a standstill at the wet
  shimmer of a water level as if the river
    could find no ground nor followed a course to the end

of things · waves overlap so that some partly
  cancel each other · the weight of the buoy on its cable
    holds the river to its bounds just as the sand

becomes a riverbank only at a distance · the eye
  prefigures it · the landscape itself merely
    hints at contours that are barely defined as if

page 183

solely the feasible could last · as if the real were set
  to happen seconds in advance or as if a rift
    were close to that high water mark · but the yardstick

is fixed to nothing · the stake breaks like an arm that lunges
  into a mirror and is refracted by the surface
    of the river: it bends and eventually snaps · a willow twig

                                    weißenkirchen, 11. 8. 96