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Short of breath
To walk again in time of illness, short of breath.
The moment I open the door the landscape pours in.
Green and rust-coloured, the criss-crossing
thuja branches bend under the snow’s weight,
disarrayed. Behind there’s a statue wrapped
in black plastic foil, such as they use
for covering the dead after an accident.
Every surface is wet and glossy.
Beneath my feet, a sleigh’s silver trace.
I tread in thin salt-stained shoes,
a foreigner in a much too tidy landscape lying
halfway between the Ukrainian plains and the German
forests that bear monsters. An icy wind
blows through my overcoat and shakes the trees.
The pond is waiting for winter’s first ice. In one
or two nights it will be swelling from the banks
inwards. All this, like fever, might be meant
merely to remind me of something. There grows
imperceptibly, as the tumours kept growing
in me, lurking desire that suddenly wipes distances away.