at island 35 for A. P.
by Ron Winkler
translated from German by Jake Schneider
the sea is flawlessly whipped up.
it earned a more unsettling designation.
right now the wind is going through a pedagogical phase.
the trees stooping down to sheer metaphors.
the gull song’s Wailing Wall implies
a full–on Wailing Settlement behind it.
the concept of a tide probably finds
mass appeal among Arrivalists.
the longer you stare, the sudsier.
but that’s as tricky to prove
as the kinship between sea–
anemonies and animosities.
at a water neither river nor pond
by Ron Winkler
translated from German by Jake Schneider
wind forces flagellations on the trees —
a suffering grasped out of thin air.
for reassurance, it must be added:
their blossoms carry no pistols.
the landscape dignified, as if once
populated by Flemish painters.
the surrounding grass something
between hill swans and bristle bulls.
probably, the tread–on green
is the flip side of a discrete being.
quite different, the inevitable fauna —
in first place comes the frog’s racket faction.
when they’re not bathing, they’re baptising
the scene with their throats’ green notes.
the waves are easy to identify —
they jump springform pans on the land.
in the transition area, a few yards
of sludge serve as mud for art’s sake.
the seagulls serve onto nothing.
too bisyllabic their appearance.
whoever swims here is not a stroke,
but a swish in the water.
x-referential field portrait
by Ron Winkler
translated from German by Jake Schneider
so these cows, right, were parading
around like absurd typewriters.
for that matter they weren’t cows at all.
more like black–and–white moments caught in pixels.
and no typewriter could muck up
a meadow. whatever. what mattered
was the blink–of–an–eye–ness of a thing.
together with airy psyche, right.
multiple dimensions bottomed against each other
and, in spite of constant refreshing, turned up
tainted search results: grass drops,
existence deposits,
and past them the migration
of a narrow awareness. here
the meadow and there the contorted messages
of their horns. eyes
like uninhabited planets. cows, right,
as agreed upon, cows —
at the end of their biography.
Bertie Koller
Considering himself primarily a song writer, Bertie Koller sings his own songs, plays guitar and banjo. He lives and performs largely in mid and coastal Maine, where he’s lived most of his life.
