Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr
Rainer Maria Rilke, 21.9.1902, Paris
Things to do before winter
This is a quince
It was squatted by an extended family of worms
It became their home
This is a house that Jack, the worm, lived in
The house fell down from about two meters up
It kept rolling on the wet ground
Among fallen green, brown, yellow leaves
It hid in the leaves
The quince remained their house
The worms kept eating it
They ate it gradually
The walls, the pipes, electric wire, the roof, the cellar
Leaving seeds out
On the earth
October earth of 2024
While eating, the family of worms was also writing down information about the house
Its plan, its Grundriss, its design
Trying to memorize all the tiniest details of the way the house was built
And upon finishing their house manuscript
They hid various pages of it in the seeds
In numerous seeds
The family was gone that winter
The seeds lay still until their time came
To be eaten by the birds and spread all around
To grow again
Into new houses
For new families
Or to be taken on a mission to Mars
To bring some plant and insect data into outer space
To keep it as a memory of a particular garden in a particular city on Earth
Berlin, October 2024
I work in the National Library of Worm Studies
I go hunting for the diaries of such worm families
I decipher their notes
I reproduce their plans
I cut the seeds open in an emergency room
To extract words and ideas and stories
I keep the archives of these texts
I come to work in the afternoon and leave late
Sometimes around midnight
Late in the night I look out of the window
At the concrete wall of the house across the street
And I try to imagine
That quince
What if I bit it
Ate a part of it
Would I have that knowledge inside of me?
The knowledge of how to live in a house
How to inhabit a house
How to allow houses to be built on this planet
Before winter comes.
Angelina Davydova
06.10.2024
Poesiewerkstatt mit Gartenaktion
Spreeacker e.V., Berlin
Angelina Davydova: Journalistin, Essayistin, Autorin. Geboren in St. Petersburg, Russland, wohnt in Berlin seit 2022.
