Far off

in a life,

the whooper swans call

in short echos,

as if wound in wet rags

or locked inside Elvis Presley's

Heartbreak Hotel echo chamber

in the 1950s

The house stands

on the outskirts of the whoopers,

stubbornly built

with floors, walls and roof,

like the murmur of an old ballad

over since long dead-and-forgottens' wanderings

in the wastelands

Dead tired, the memories wait

for their burials in the summer graves

Deep inside a linen cupboard

lie a couple of pieces of jewellery,

purchased with butter and tar,

as subdued and distant

as the whooper swans' three calls

out of a cubic geometry

way off at the Western Marsh

In a vain try at contemporaneity

in an old man

with my personal particulars,

three unrequited calls from morning whoopers in crystal

are heard

The senior's bed floats in the air

in the distance

The morning's breath through the forests

unchains all moments

One moment

carries the sifted swamp consolation

of whoopers

out of the melancholy of night

unto the bed that hovers

in a house

with the aged, loosely wound in sheets

The Day signs for 7th August,

unprotected in its precautions,

when the swans fall silent

through a rip in time,

and songbirds squander silence

The oldtimer lies stacked

in all his ages

The Western Marsh

takes part in a vast drainage,

and Time

in a great euthanasia,

while the Day wraps itself in its reasons