My story and yours
still separate, frozen
are starting to melt:
Letters flow away,
sentences gather in puddles…

Our story, one slow current,
trickles into new patterns,
seeps into the ground or evaporates
save for a bit of dust,
and falls down as rain, somewhere.

For the series of photographs “story, written on ice” I wrote on a bloc of ice with Indian ink. I chose two different fragments of German text, one from a family saga by John von Düffel, whose writing usually has to do with water. The other line is from a poem which is better known as the song “The miller’s joy is wandering”. Here are the translations:

Impossible to say, how often I thought of these rivers, how often I dreamt of them, how many nights I was drawn to them, when I was passing through sleeping towns, dry, riverless towns, on the search for water, on the search for the movement of water,(…). My translation from: John von Düffel “Vom Wasser” (On water).

The water teaches us to move, the water. From: Wilhelm Müller “Wandering”