This is how it often goes: A volume of poetry has been in the wrong place on the bookshelf for years.

But is there a 'right' place for a book?

Doesn't it gain precisely from being disguised, by attracting substances from so-called non-fiction books?

Does this make the 'things' poetic 'fantasies'?

That would be a case of spiritual osmosis.

However, the narrow spine looks at you, embarrassed, questioning, arousing curiosity.

And then you finally take on this book, it opens up and you read: “Frankfurt”.

It triggers memories: never more romantic than on the night of the last lunar eclipse on the Mainkai, strolling, then tightly entwined, letting your legs hang over the quay wall, confessing to each other's innermost being.

Or had it been a tender dream and thus fuel for (too) daring hopes back then?

Duration of volatility on the Main

Now, however, all hope, dreams and memories have become poems, consisting of three quintets: "Frankfurt" - and without clichés.

There is no talk of banks, stock exchanges and commerce, nor of the spruced up Roman quarter or the Paulskirche, which has been shamefully talked about as the place of German democratic history par excellence.

When reading it for the first time, it is easy to misread the fifth line.

Instead of the "islands in the day," which should be separated from their closer qualifications, the "clouds," "trees," and "birds," by a comma, I read "islands," written in lower case, as a new, poetically legitimate, verb: The clouds, trees, birds islands - and that "in the day".

The romantic lunar eclipse had dissolved into daylight.

what is happening here

In the process, the fleeting, the smile, acquires an unusual duration;

because it "takes root".

It remains unclear where this smile takes root - really "in the countries behind the moment"?

The inanimate has come to life: the statues behind actual life.

Things dissolve, become fleeting ideas – and this in the city where an odd flâneur from yesteryear, Schopenhauer, who declared the world to be a product of will and imagination, spent the second half of his life.

Clouds, trees, birds – understood as islands in time, vague as they remain in this poem, as if by chance in Frankfurt and not again;

because nothing is named more specifically in Röhnert's poem than this very place with its Mainkai.

There is nothing to indicate that the first stanza runs towards "clouds", the second towards "trees" and the third towards "birds".

In these stanzas they are the final points, surprises, especially since they are all understood as “islands”, not in water but in the air of time (not: '-ran').

These islands cannot be located;

they seem to be just anchorages in day-to-day events.

And the “wool threads on the hem, curls in the wind”, they describe the semi-free, partially bound, imperceptible and yet significant details in the fleeting on the river, which has been urbanized for the length of the quay.

Or is the hem about to unravel, is the seam unraveling?

The wind carries on the curls or catches them, or simply carries them, blowing them like a stranger's flag;

for it is unclear to which head this hair belongs.

And much wants to be left in the dark, no matter how concise the simple images in this poem are.

If the ephemeral in the Main metropolis can be captured in stanzas that seem to float, then the flat clichés about this city also evaporate - at least for the duration of the poem.