Meret Oppenheim

Trans. by Kathleen Heil

SELF-PORTRAIT FROM 50,000 B.C. TO X

My feet stand up on stones rounded
by many steps in a craggy cave. I let
myself enjoy the bear meat. My belly
is bathed by a warm ocean current, I
stand in the lagoons, my gaze lands on a city’s
reddened walls. Arms and ribcage are stuck in
armor made of tightly sewn leather scales. In
my hands I hold a turtle made of white
marble. In my head my thoughts are
shut in as in a beehive.
I’ll write them down later. The script was burned
when the library at Alexandria burned. The black
snake with the white head is located in
the museum in Paris. It too will burn. Each and every
thought that has ever been thunk rolls round the earth
in the great spirit-sphere. The earth cracks, the
spirit-sphere bursts, the thoughts disperse in the
universe, where they on other stars
live on.

The Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim was born in Berlin in 1913 and spent her formative years in the artistic company of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and André Breton in Paris, where she also designed accessories for Elsa Schiaparelli. At the time of her death in 1985, her body of work included painting, works on paper, and object constructions, as well as jewelry designs, public sculpture commissions, and poetry.

Kathleen Heil is an artist working with languages of the body and the written word. Her poems and translations of poems appear in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, diode, Diaphanes, Fence, jubilat, Puerto del Sol, The Common, The New Yorker, Two Lines, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others, she lives and works in Berlin. More at kathleenheil.net.