Excerpts from
Tabernacle
By Niels Frank
The water splashes and the palms rise
above the most mundane banalities we revel in.
The rest merely looks on, casually studies
the external, extrovert side of itself.
It’s a pleasant day, a good day to live.
Everything is so simple, but simplicity
is an enourmous art. For if suddenly every detail disappears,
dissolved in sunlight, only the idea itself remains, the abundance,
and it cannot distinguish between day side and night side.
In the idea, reality is only an impression.
In the idea, reality is impeccable: it covers its own tracks,
so that each remaining thing may mark an enclosed here.
But the water, too, is a trace, especially if someone plunges into it
from a yellow diving board. The splash hisses up in a chased coolness
and betrays him, destroys the perfection of the surface,
makes it crackle: it marks a here
which is absent. What's most alluring is concealed,
you can only dream of it, unless the most alluring things
are precisely those you can only dream of. Everything else
is indifferent in its explicitness.
Maybe you can get to know him better, sit in the pool chairs
and eat ice cream with him while the sinking sun glitters
in each of the thousand pearls on thigh and shoulders.
In this way the idea keeps fumbling
for more and more details, until a light rain falls
on the deserted pool, and all surmises complete themselves.
Translated by Anne Born and the Author
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