circuiting
or the attempt to open a jam jar

by ANNA HENGSTBERGER
Translated by LISA SCHANTL

Intro/

There is no beginning and no end, only a circle,
a circle of which I determine the radius and the center is now—
exactly
there are small buds on the tree in front of my window which I can watch grow daily
exactly today already
one leaf

There are numbers between zero and one.
There is a red list which counts thirty-seven thousand five hundred.

1/ breathing

say
how long can you hold your breath?
ten nine eight seven six five four three two—

one hundred and thirty-six minutes
There are some who can hold theirs for one hundred and thirty-six minutes, they live in the beaked whale family.
There are some who dive extra deep

            and some who hold their breaths for all their lives.

There are plants, there are algae, there are bacteria
who turn carbon dioxide, water and light
into something new. Into glucose, into oxygen, into life.

There are numbers between zero and one, there are shades between black and white.

2/ preserving

If you had to leave, which things would you take with you?

We’re going on a trip and we’re taking—
there are things that are called valuables,
there is a photo,
there is an umbrella,
there is a book,
there is a flute,
there is a blank space—

We have to memorize all that, and we’re already running out of memory space. The glasses are dusty and the ripe fruits too. Who knows how many currants are going to hang on the branches this year, so that Grandma can boil them down to jam. Who knows what we are going to do with the boiled-down memories, if we run out of butter. Who knows where the currants will still be growing after all, when we return.

There is still one glass of currant jam left this year.
There is one glass.

3/ telling

They will have been. They will have been guests here, guests. They will have pretended to be the hosts, not the guests.

She, Ava, will have told the child about the currants that she harvested once. About the lake in which they swam in summer and on which they went ice skating in winter. She, Ava, will tell the child a story for the night.

“My child,” she will say, “once, I went to the old oak tree, like every evening, to thank her for her services. I went along the creek where the water runs like a small street on the ground. I stumbled and fell. I must have lain there for a long time, and when I woke, I reached for the next branch to help me get up. I could not find a grip. There was nothing left except a sleek surface. I did not know what was happening to me. You have to imagine, my child, that I was suddenly able to see aslant from the sky through the ground to the roots. The landscape was the most beautiful painting that you could imagine. Pitch black the earth, soaked from the rain. The roots were snaking right to my heart ventricle like veins, the rowanberries deep orange in between.

“I looked at the picture that had spread itself in front of me. I could no longer enter it. It was only to be viewed.

“Of course, my child, I have told you about it often. That was the day I realized that we were going to live here now. We call it a museum, you discover time two-dimensionally, but what am I talking, you . . .”

The child will have fallen asleep in the meantime, and Ava will leave it in the dormitory for the next few hours. She will run through the halls, view the pictures, and keep trying to open the door to the outside although she has long known that there is no turning back.

She will go to the tree, remove the linen sheet a little from the glass dome, and she will check the level of oxygen production for the seventh time this evening. It is December, shortly before Christmas.

Back in the dormitory she will open the jar with the precious memories and afford herself a look at the photo—her most favorite this time of the year. The photo of the snow-covered forest at the lake, her parents in front, long before the child entered the world. And silently she will hum the melody she has left of it: leise rieselt der Schnee, still und starr ruht der See.

Long ago she will have realized that they were trapped in a world that no longer exists.

Outro/

There is no beginning and no end, only a circle,
a circle of which I determine the radius and the center is now—
exactly
there are small buds on the tree in front of my window which I can watch grow daily
exactly today already
one leaf
I hold my radius loosely by the hand like the rope of a paper kite, up there it dances in the wind. I have been waiting a long time to find a beginning, but
there is no beginning, no end 

there is only today
now, exactly.