Landscape in the Early Morning

The air is gray.  Who knows something good for soot? 
Next to an ox grazing on the ground
Stands an astonished deeply serious mountaineer. 
Soon there is a powerful downpour of rain. 
A young boy who is pissing on a meadow
Will be the source of a small river. 
What should one do when nature calls! 
Be natural.  Be yourself. 
A poet roams around in the world,
Observes for himself the orderly flow of traffic
And rejoices about sky, field, and dung. 
Ah, and he takes careful notice of everything. 
Then he climbs a high mountain
Which happens to be close by.

Return of the Village Boy

In my youth the world was a small pond,
Grandma and red roof, lowing
Of oxen and a clump of trees. 
And all around the huge green meadow. 
How lovely was this dreaming into distance. 
This absolute nothingness as bright air and wind
And bird cries and fairy-tale books. 
Far off the fabled iron snake whistled—­

Summer Freshness

The sky is like a blue jellyfish. 
And all around are fields, rolling meadows—­
Peaceful world, you great mousetrap,
Would that I might finally escape from you..  O if I had wings—­
One plays dice.  Guzzles.  Chatters about future countries. 
Each person puts in his own two cents. 
The earth is a succulent Sunday roast,
Nicely dunked into a sweet sun-sauce. 
If only there were a wind... that ripped
The gentle world with iron claws.  That would amuse me. 
But if a storm comes...  It would shred
The lovely blue eternal sky into a thousand pieces.

Afternoon, Fields and Factory

I can no longer find a place for my eyes. 
I cannot hold my legs together. 
My heart is hollow.  My head is going to burst. 
Mushiness all around.  Nothing wants to take shape. 
My tongue breaks.  And my mouth twists. 
In my skull there is neither pleasure nor goal. 
The sun, a buttercup, rocks itself
On a chimney, its slender stalk.

Rainy Night

The day is ruined.  The sky is drunk. 
Like false pearls, little stumps
Of chopped up light lie around and reveal
A glimpse of streets, a few clumps of houses. 
Everything else is rotten and devoured
By a black fog, which, like a wall,
Falls down and is rotten.  And the rain
Crumbles like rubble in the grip—­thick—­gray—­
As though the whole contaminated darkness
Wanted at every moment to sink. 
Down in a swamp you see an auto flash,
Like a strange, drunken plant. 
The oldest whores come crawling
Along out of wet shadows—­tubercular toads. 
There goes one creeping by.  Over there a pig