The Half-Finished Heaven
Page 7
Questions that in a rage I tossed out
come whizzing back
not piercing me but nailing my outline down firmly
a rough outline
when I have left the spot it stays there.
Often I have to say nothing. Voluntarily!
Because the “last word” can be spoken again and again.
Because hello and good-bye …
Because this day that has at last come today …
Because the margins eventually will rebel
overflow their banks
and flood the texts.
I stayed over in the sleepwalker’s motel.
Many faces here are in despair
others flattened
after their pilgrim’s walk through forgetting.
They breathe vanish fight their way back
looking beyond me
they all want to reach the icon of justice.
It is so seldom
that one of us truly sees the other:
for a fraction of a second as in a photograph
a man appears but sharper
and behind him
something that is bigger than his shadow.
He is standing full length in front of a mountain.
It is more a snail shell than a mountain.
It is more a house than a snail shell.
It is not a house but there are many rooms.
It is indistinct but overpowering.
Out of it he grows and it grows out of him.
It is his life, and it is his labyrinth.
4. POEMS FROM
The Wild Market Square (1983)
For the Living and the Dead (1989)
Grief Gondola (1996)
The Great Conundrum (2004)
From March ’79
Being tired of people who come with words, but no speech,
I made my way to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The pages free of handwriting stretched out on all sides!
I came upon the tracks of reindeer in the snow.
Speech but no words.
Fire Script
During the heavy months my life caught fire only when
I made love with you.
The firefly too lights up and goes out, lights up and goes out
—by quick glimpses we follow its route
among the olive trees in the darkness of night.
During the heavy months the soul sat
indolent and crushed,
but the body took the nearest way to you.
The night heavens gave off moos.
We stole milk from the cosmos and survived.
Black Postcards
I.
The calendar all booked up, the future unknown.
The cable silently hums some folk song
but lacks a country. Snow falls in the gray sea. Shadows
fight out on the dock.
II.
Halfway through your life, death turns up
and takes your pertinent measurements. We forget
the visit. Life goes on. But someone is sewing
the suit in the silence.
Romanesque Arches
Tourists have crowded into the half-dark of the enormous
Romanesque church.
Vault opening behind vault and no perspective.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel whose face I couldn’t see embraced me
and his whisper went all through my body:
“Don’t be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!
Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly.
You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”
Tears blinded me
as we were herded out into the fiercely sunlit piazza,
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Herr Tanaka and Signora
Sabatini;
within each of them vault after vault opened endlessly.
The Forgotten Commander
We have lots of shadows. I was walking home
one September night when Y
after forty years climbed from his grave
and joined me.
At first he was entirely hollow, only a name,
but his thoughts could swim
faster than time could run
and caught up with me.
I set his eyes to my eyes
and saw the ocean in wartime.
The last ship he captained
rose beneath us.
The Atlantic convoy moved behind and ahead—
those destined to survive
and those who had received the Mark
(no one could see it).
Meanwhile sleepless nights relieved
each other but no one relieved him.
Life-jacket fat under his slicker.
He didn’t make it home.
It was internal weeping that drained his blood
in a Cardiff hospital.
Able at last to lie down,
he turned into the horizon.
Farewell, eleven-knot ships! Good-bye 1940!
The history of the world ended here.
The bombers remained in air.
The heather went on blossoming.
A photo early in the century shows a beach.
We see six boys dressed up.
They have sailboats in their arms.
What serious faces!
Boats for some become life and death.
Even to write about the dead
is also a play that turns heavy
from the weight of what is to come.
Vermeer
It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the
other side of the wall
where the alehouse is
with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its
chiming of clocks,
and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence
everyone feels fear.
The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late,
boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into
pockets—the wrong man’s—
ultimatum piled on ultimatum,
wide-mouthed red flowers whose sweat reminds us of approaching
war.
And then straight through the wall—from there—straight into
the airy studio
and the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries.
Paintings that choose the name: The Music Lesson
or A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.
The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.
Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the
chairs.
Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed
and stopped smack there
as if they had always been stillness and nothing else.
The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.
It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,
the pressure that makes each fact float
and makes the brushstroke firm.
Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,
but we have no choice.
It’s all one world. Now to the walls.
The walls are a part of you.
One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone
except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.
It is like a prayer to what is empty.
And what is empty turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”
The Cuckoo
A cuckoo sat cooing in a birch just north of the hous
e. The sound was so powerful that I first thought it was an opera singer performing a cuckoo imitation. Surprised I saw a bird. Its tailfeathers moved up and down with every note, like a pump handle at a well. The bird hopped on both feet, then turned its body around and cried out to all four directions. Then it rose and flew muttering something over the house and flew a long way into the west…. The summer grows old and everything collapses into a single melancholy sigh. Cuculus canoras returns to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is over. It won’t be long! As a matter of fact the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire. I am not so much in love with travel any longer. But the journey visits me. In these days when I am pushed farther and farther into a corner, when the tree rings widen, when I need reading glasses. Many more things happen than we can carry. There is nothing to be astonished about. These thoughts carry me just as loyally as Susi and Chuma carried Livingston’s mummified body all the way through Africa.
The Kingdom of Uncertainty
The department head leans forward and draws an X
and her earrings sway like the sword of Damocles.
As a spotted butterfly becomes invisible against the meadow
the demon slips in and merges with the opened newspaper.
A helmet with nothing inside has taken power.
The mother turtle escapes flying under the water.
Three Stanzas
I.
The knight and his lady
turned to stone but happy
on a flying mortuary lid
outside of time.
II.
Jesus held up a coin
with Tiberius in profile.
A profile without love—
power recycling.
III.
A wet sword
wipes out all memories.
On the field trumpets
and swordbelts rusting.
Two Cities
There is a stretch of water, a city on each side—
one of them utterly dark, where enemies live.
Lamps are burning in the other.
The well-lit shore hypnotizes the dark shore.
I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark water.
A steady note of a tuba comes in.
It’s a friend’s voice: “Take up your grave and walk.”
Island Life, 1860
I.
Down at the dock she was washing clothes one day,
and the deep-sea cold rose right up along her arms
and into her being.
Her frozen tears became spectacles.
The island lifted itself by its own grass
and the herring flag floated far down in the sea.
II.
Also the swarming hive of smallpox got to him
settled onto his face.
He lies in bed looking at the ceiling.
How hard it is to row up the stream of silence.
This moment’s stain that flows out for eternity
this moment’s wound that bleeds in for eternity.
April and Silence
Spring lies abandoned.
A ditch the color of dark violet
moves alongside me
giving no images back.
The only thing that shines
are some yellow flowers.
I am carried inside
my own shadow like a violin
in its black case.
The only thing I want to say
hovers just out of reach
like the family silver
at the pawnbroker’s.
Landscape with Suns
The sun slips forward from behind the neighboring house,
clumps itself down mid-street
and breathes on us
with its red breath.
Innsbrück, now I have to leave you.
But tomorrow morning
a fierce sun will appear
in the grayish half-dead wood
where we shall work and live.
Midwinter
A blue glow
streams out from my clothes.
Midwinter.
A clinking tambour made of ice.
I close my eyes.
Somewhere there’s a silent world
and there is an open place
where the dead
are being smuggled over the border.
Grief Gondola #2
I.
Two old guys, father-in-law and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner live
on the Grand Canal
along with that nervous woman who is wife to King Midas—
I mean the one who turns everyone he touches into Wagner.
The green cold of the ocean presses upward through the palazzo
floor.
Wagner has received the Mark, his famous Punchinello profile
sags now
his face is a white flag.
The heavily loaded gondola carries their lives, two return tickets
and a one-way.
II.
A palazzo window blows open; they make a face at the sudden
draft.
Outside on the water the garbage gondola passes, oared by two
one-armed thieves.
Liszt has composed a few chords so heavy one should send them
off to the Institute for Mineralogical Studies in Padua.
Meteorites!
Far too heavy to stay where they are, they start sinking and
sinking down through the coming years until they reach
the year of the Brownshirts.
The heavily loaded gondola carried the hunched stones of the
future.
III.
Pinholes toward 1990.
March 25: Disturbed about Lithuania.
I dreamt that I visited a large hospital.
No staff. Everyone was a patient.
In the same dream a newborn baby girl
who spoke in complete sentences.
IV.
The son-in-law, comparatively, is a modernist, Liszt is a
moth-eaten grandsigneur.
It’s a disguise.
The deep that tries and throws away various masks has chosen this
particular mask for him—
the deep that loves to invade humanity without showing its own
face.
V.
Old father Liszt is used to lugging his own bags through storm,
snow, and heat
and when he arrives at death no one will meet him at the station.
A warm whiff of a highly cultured cognac carried him off in the
middle of a commission.
He always has commissions.
Two thousand letters a year!
The schoolboy who has to write the misspelled word a hundred
times before he can go home.
The heavily loaded gondola carries life, it is simple and black.
VI.
Back now to 1990.
I dreamt I drove a hundred miles for nothing.
Then everything got huge. Sparrows the size of hens
sang so loud that my ears closed up.
I dreamt that I had sketched piano keys out
on the kitchen table. I played on them, without a sound.
Neighbors came by to listen.
VII.
The clavier which has been silent through the entire Parsifal (of
course it was listening) finally gets to talk.
Sighs … sospiri …
When Liszt plays tonight he holds down the sea-pedal so that the
ocean’s green force
rises through the floor and penetrates every stone of the building.
Good evening to you, beautiful deep!
The heavily loaded gondola carries life, it is simple and black.
VIII.
I dreamt that I was to start school but arrived late.
Everyone in the room wore white masks on their faces.
It was impos
sible to know which was the teacher.
(Note: During late 1882 and early 1883, Liszt visited his daughter Cosima and her husband, Richard Wagner, in Venice. Wagner died several months later. Liszt’s two piano pieces published under the title Grief Gondola were composed during that time.)
Haiku
Birdpeople.
The apple tree blossomed.
The great conundrum.
TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER was born on April 15, 1931, in Stockholm, Sweden, and he studied literature and psychology at the University of Stockholm. He spent much of his career as a psychologist for juvenile offenders. He is the author of a dozen works of poetry and a prose memoir, and his work has been translated into more than fifty languages. In 2011, Tranströmer received the Nobel Prize for Literature “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” He received numerous other honors, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, Germany’s Petrarch Prize, the Bellman Prize, the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, the August Prize, and a Special Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. Tranströmer died on March 26, 2015, in Stockholm.
ROBERT BLY was born on December 23, 1926, in Minnesota. He is a poet, translator, essayist, and cultural critic. He is the author of more than thirty works of poetry, including Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems and The Light Around the Body, which received the 1968 National Book Award. As the editor of the influential publications The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, Bly introduced American readers to important inter national poets, including Pablo Neruda, Tomas Tranströmer, César Vallejo, and many others. Bly’s translations appear in numerous books, including The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations. In 2013, he received the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for “distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.” Bly lives in Minneapolis.
Their decades-long friendship in poetry and translation is celebrated in Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer.