TEL AVIV,
fragmentarily, divided into scenes, swaying with a Martini, shaking hands, with a burned upper lip, stumbling – on the edge of exhaustion, we sit silently in what remains of the monsters’ crossfire. I accommodate my serenity in a casket on four table mats. It’s familiar and certainly pretty. Well normed, galloping through valleys and steppes, washed in a waft of mist, massive mountain ridges extend like a hibernating bear wrapped in velvet at the picture’s upper-right edge. Every mere expression elicits an adventure, so that nothing remains of the former yearning on our canopy swing. In this town, or at its two ends, there are only two kinds of despair – and inevitably no escape. I jump up and down, as if struck by lightening, loudly, but you don’t hear me. Please capture me, in the midst of the disruptions and alphabets that alter their opinion every hour on the hour. A break. I stretch a rope between two proud lilac trees and climb softly, hand over hand, through the canyons of America. Here as elsewhere, because I have already been there. Only to lay my head at the end of the day on your cushion, and to loose myself in the rambling nocturnal stillness. And meanwhile time dashes through space on the quiet, hoping to find out what time is. One night we follow it in secret, like admirers in a novel, simply so as to be allowed to lose our way for once. Or we buy waxed paper and keep ourselves hidden, undecided as to whether we can escape this bandit in the long run. Perhaps under water, in the depths of the ocean, collecting pottery jars lost by some ship a thousand years ago. And so it goes, until the world gets wise to us and says: ‘You belong to me too.’ And then we disappear, very quietly, as if we had never been there. But until then, don’t forget to fly.
fragmentarily, divided into scenes, swaying with a Martini, shaking hands, with a burned upper lip, stumbling – on the edge of exhaustion, we sit silently in what remains of the monsters’ crossfire. I accommodate my serenity in a casket on four table mats. It’s familiar and certainly pretty. Well normed, galloping through valleys and steppes, washed in a waft of mist, massive mountain ridges extend like a hibernating bear wrapped in velvet at the picture’s upper-right edge. Every mere expression elicits an adventure, so that nothing remains of the former yearning on our canopy swing. In this town, or at its two ends, there are only two kinds of despair – and inevitably no escape. I jump up and down, as if struck by lightening, loudly, but you don’t hear me. Please capture me, in the midst of the disruptions and alphabets that alter their opinion every hour on the hour. A break. I stretch a rope between two proud lilac trees and climb softly, hand over hand, through the canyons of America. Here as elsewhere, because I have already been there. Only to lay my head at the end of the day on your cushion, and to loose myself in the rambling nocturnal stillness. And meanwhile time dashes through space on the quiet, hoping to find out what time is. One night we follow it in secret, like admirers in a novel, simply so as to be allowed to lose our way for once. Or we buy waxed paper and keep ourselves hidden, undecided as to whether we can escape this bandit in the long run. Perhaps under water, in the depths of the ocean, collecting pottery jars lost by some ship a thousand years ago. And so it goes, until the world gets wise to us and says: ‘You belong to me too.’ And then we disappear, very quietly, as if we had never been there. But until then, don’t forget to fly.
Ivonne Dippmann, excerpt Liebeslied Chemnitz – Tel Aviv, 2018
Translation: M. Turnbull
