Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

316 · Jan Wagner
chameleon
it is older than this bishop’s staff
which it drags behind itself: crook
of the tail. come down to us, we call
upward to his perch when the tongue,
become a telescope, shoots out, devours
a constellation’s butterfly, astronomer
with one gaze toward the sky and the other
to the ground – thus keeping its distance
from both. the eye’s cupola, armored with scales,
a fortress; behind which
only the pupil moves, a nervous
glittering within its loopholes (some days
you come across its skin like an empty
barracks, a long-abandoned belief).
come down, we call. but it doesn’t
move, slowly disappears
between the colors. it hides in the world.
Translated by David Keplinger
and Katharina Norden, with the author