- PROLOGUE: WEATHER REPORT OF THE BROKEN HORIZON
The sky is a folded envelope
full of unsent Ferienpostkarten.
Every cloud is a lost corner of yesterday,
drifting, saying: bonjour, encore, again.
The wind moves diagonally,
von links unten nach rechts oben,
because straight lines were outlawed
in this valley of politely exploding colors.
- LAW OF THE RIVERS
First law:
all rivers here flow away from meaning
and only sometimes back to the sea.
Second law:
water remembers every geometry lesson
it ever failed.
That’s why it bends in abrupt blue sentences,
comma, comma, Zickzack,
never a full stop.
Third law:
if you stare at the turquoise too long,
it forgets it is water
and starts introducing itself as
“quiet electricity, enchanté”.
I walk along the bank,
but the bank walks along me,
changing currency from time to distance,
from Deutsch to English,
from noch nicht to almost there.
- THE MOUNTAINS HOLD A MEETING
In the middle distance,
the green mountains fold themselves
into a committee.
They rustle like paper bags
full of unsaid arguments.
Chairperson Peak bangs a stone:
“Order! Ordre! Ordnung bitte!”
Triangles lean in,
parallelograms lean out,
one little rhombus takes minutes
in illegible moss-script.
They debate:
Shall we stay solid
or become fleets of paper boats
and sail down these zigzag rivers?
A shy hill in the back murmurs,
“je suis déjà Wasser,
I just haven’t told my stones yet.”
- BODY OF CLAY, BODY OF COLOR
The red ground under my hooves—
yes, suddenly I realize,
I am the pig that is not drawn.
Invisible cochon,
wandering through a landscape
that forgot to include me.
Kein Problem.
I borrow a contour from the shoreline,
two shadows from the cliffs,
a bit of blue for my snout.
Wherever I step,
ochre shifts its accent:
ochre, Ocker, ocre—
same mud, three languages,
all of them spelling:
you are allowed to exist
slightly off-center.
- META-CARTOGRAPHY INCIDENT
A mapmaker arrives with a ruler.
The ruler melts.
He tries again with GPS;
the satellites answer in haiku,
refusing coordinates,
offering only riddles:
between two bends
the river remembers being sky
recalculating, recalculating
The mapmaker shrugs,
puts the device into flight mode,
and starts measuring in daydreams per meter.
According to his chart,
this valley is 47 nostalgias wide
and 3.5 quiet revolutions deep.
- DADA BREAK: UNSCHEDULED ANNOUNCEMENT
Lautsprecher über den Hügeln:
“Ping! Attention, attention,
all polygons please report
to the central crumpling station.
Today’s special:
buy one corner, get two paradoxes free.
Children under twelve edges
fold for half price.”
Echo answers:
ping ping,
plouf,
pingpingplouf,
until the whole gorge sounds
like a bilingual ringtone.
- SMALL LOVE STORY WITH SEDIMENT
Down by the narrowest channel
I meet a sandbar named Vielleicht.
Vielleicht says:
“I was once a mountain,
but ambition eroded me.”
I say:
“I was once a domestic fantasy,
but abstraction set me free.”
We sit together,
watching time arrive as blue water
and leave as brown memory.
A pebble composes a postcard:
Wish you were here,
but in another geological era.
- CONTRADICTION SESSION
Suddenly the colors file a complaint.
The blue says,
“I am tired of symbolizing melancholy,
I want to stand for practical optimism.”
The green says,
“People keep calling me nature
as if I didn’t also belong
to cheap plastic chairs.”
The yellow slabs in the sky protest:
“We’re not sunshine.
We’re the highlighter streaks
on the draft of existence.”
Ich stimme zu,
I vote in favor,
je l’approuve.
From now on,
nothing means what it did yesterday.
Everything gets a rotating schedule of meanings,
like shift work in a metaphysical factory.
- ORIGAMI RIVER PARLIAMENT IN SESSION
Evening folds itself carefully
into the valleys.
The rivers convene,
each current a delegate of some elsewhere.
One speaks for the glacier,
one for forgotten rain,
one for the municipal tap.
They argue in gurgles and swirls
about the next century’s route:
Should we carve deeper,
or rise up in vapor
and infiltrate the decision-making clouds?
A radical little stream shouts:
“Ni links, ni rechts—
let’s flow vertically!”
Everyone laughs
until they notice the stream
is already climbing the sky
like a turquoise rope.
- CLOSING: TOMORROW’S DELTA
Night comes as a gentle misprint,
turning blue into almost-black,
green into remembered-green,
red into a rumor.
I, unsketched pig,
fold myself into a small boat
and push off.
The river whispers:
no final destination,
only temporary shores.
Hinter mir entfaltet sich das Tal
wieder in tausend Möglichkeiten,
and the mountains,
still in committee,
vote to dream of oceans
they will never see—
so that, maybe,
the oceans will start dreaming back.
The laws dissolve.
Only the zigzag horizon remains,
waiting to be redrawn
by whoever dares to look tomorrow
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