Following Inger Christensen’s alphabet (the first 7 poems in a longer sequence),
translated by Susanna Nied.

1
adornments exist, adornments exist

2
barnacles exist; and backwards, backwards;
books exist; and water, water

3
crying rivers exist; clanking, curling,
crawling; crying rivers exist;
crying rivers, corners, cascading, the cerebrospinal

4
dancers exist, disappearings, and driftwood;
floods exist, and dryness, and dryness;
sediment, fossil, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

5
echoed reading exists, pouring, pushing;
resistance and aquatic wings exist;
orphans and seahorses exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
interrupting exists; antlers, antennas,
branches, closeness, imprintings exist;
horse’s hairs, sponges, and wet suits
exist, and the carrying, the carrying

6
followers of movement exist, with their tidal suggestions
resting, with their half-gestured reflecting and their
liquid body treatments they exist; in pauses
they exist, in the so-called ecotone;
fish, too, exist, and otoliths, sturgeon;
feet, paspalum, and petrified keys;
softness and the rushes of remembering exist;
returns exist, touching, not repairing,
backwards; before knowing exists, and weather;
and water writings exist, water there in the river where
adornments exist, adornments exist
in currents whose interruptions call the exact
energy of adornments in secret

7
given limits exist, streets, oblivion
and grass and gravel and ground and grey,
eagerness exists, given limits
waves exist, wind lifting them exists,
and the talking made by the waves
of the story called a tributary exists,
of the story called an intercalation, a fabulation,
an anecdote, the talking repeated
in the room’s corner; weeping
exists as well, plastic and holes,
refugees, snake-shaped algae, ducks and their young;
and dams exist, an enigmatic shore line;
overgrown, bird, interrupting just as a friend,
dams exist; in the midst of uneven
country border damns exist
with their fear-forming, sentimental intent
seas and wailing women, full as
greedy crabs exist; the scene of the falling exists;
the scene of the falling, sleepy, alive, ancient,
bathed in a forworlding, detoxification,
this woven, wet crumbling poem