Das Sprechende Organ / THE SPEAKING ORGAN

Das Sprechende Organ

Er pflügte die Furchen direkt über den Toten. Wie schafft der Wolf an einem entfernten Ort ihren Namen? Der Garten schließt sich über die Körper wie ein Muskel, feucht und grün, wie der Mund, der göttliche Befehle preisgibt, nicht kommunizierbar. In der Zeit des Eises reserviert er ein Maß für jede angebaute Ernte, glühenden Mais, Gold. Gegen das Herz setzt er seine tadellosen Rekorde, wiegt seine Nummer für jeden grünen Apfel, jede Kornähre, sogar den Stiel, der keine Früchte trägt. Welches fehlbare Organ ist dennoch geduldiger als das Herz? Es schlägt weiter, während der Gott im Herbst jede Blüte von seinen blutgebundenen Pfaden pflückt und seine Offenheit für seine eigene Wahrheit beansprucht. Seine Gnade ist variabel, wie die Qualität der Frucht. Aber da diese vom Fleisch der Toten genährt wurden und der Darm ein tiefes inneres Terrain darstellt, sind sie glänzend und saftig. Das einzige, was Gott in seinem immensen Hunger erwartet, ist unterirdisch, auf der Ebene, die er selbst verurteilt hat. Das Leben, das er will, ist schließlich unterirdisch. Hier sitzt er allein mit Messer und Gabel. Der Wolf heult aus der Ferne ihr sättigendes Wort.


The Speaking Organ

He plowed the furrows right over the dead. In a distant place, how does the wolf create her name? The garden locks over the bodies like a muscle, humid and green, like the mouth that leaks divine commands, noncommunicable. In the time of ice, he reserves a measure of every crop grown, glowing corn, gold. Against the heart he wagers his impeccable records, weighs his number for each green apple, every ear of corn, even the stalk that fails to bear fruit. Nevertheless, what fallible organ is more patient than the heart? It continues beating as the God in autumn plucks each bloom from its blood-webbed paths, claims its candor for his own Truth. His clemency is variable, like the quality of the fruit. But since these were nourished by the flesh of the dead, and the intestines prove a profound interior terrain, they are lustrous, succulent. The only thing God anticipates in his immense hunger is subterranean, in the level he has himself condemned. The life he wants is underground, after all. Here he sits, alone with knife and fork. The wolf howls her satiating word from the distance.

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from Digital Vestiges (Black Sun Lit)

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Georg Amsel comes from Salzburg and conceives poetic ideas in an Austrian German from the late 1800s. His poems appear recently in ANMLY, Exchanges, Cagibi, Portland Review, and Passages North, among others, and his work “Komfort,” translated by Lake Angela as “Comfort,” is included in Best Literary Translations 2025 (Deep Vellum). His poetry seeks to disrupt the contemporary uses of language as much as its translations do.

Lake Angela is a body of water with tributaries in poetry and dance. Her latest book is Scivias Choreomaniae (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), or “Know the Ways of the Dancing Madness,” a poetry collection on her work as a Mad dance therapist at a state psychiatric institution for others on the schizophrenia spectrum. Lake holds a PhD in Intersemiotic Translation and an MFA in Poetry and is a medieval mystic and nonhuman creature. Poems appear in The Common, Poetry Salzburg Review, Seneca Review, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work is also featured in The Laureate Project from her time as poet laureate of Bucks County, PA.