You had to go far

inside the eye of a grasshopper,

under tilting polar ice packs,

under the taut shoulders of women

rushing home, slinging a satchel

of rice and vegetables into their haste,

and then go further slipping

between the electric wires that snake

their way through the frames of houses,

under the composite skin

of old photographs —
all this to see

the smallest fragment

of who you are.
But this is barely a beginning.
How do you put a fish into a poem?

Not the label ‘fish’, the mere name,

for that would solve nothing

and a bundle of names can’t swim

in even the shallowest water —

but a fish swimming fast,

we can’t grasp it even with our hands.
Yet in a poem the water

swims even faster than the fish

and we glide, almost effortless, through the water

as through doors leading far inside us.
And if I place a jellyfish, the Turritopsis dohrnii for instance,

inside my poem

what happens then?

Will my room glow

so brightly I will be unable to leave,

shedding my worn-out skin

to stay in its company? 
When at last you float on your side

and between the slats of the sauna

the sky slips away

you don’t scream at the void

for robbing you of daylight —

even the smallest grassblades know

they cannot shrink their way

into timelessness.
A long way further than us a fig tree

           reaches out,

its green-brown mountainscape of roots

           so joyful to climb

for a young grasshopper.