They’re lit and quenched by headlong clouds
that only when they shade the light betray
their presence, like clouds of the past that scud
through souls. When I walk past
the stable wall I hear in all that noise
the sick horse tramping inside.
And there’s departure in the storm,
by a broken gate that bangs and bangs, a lamp
swaying from a hand, a beast that cackles
frightened on the hill. Departure in the thunderous
rumble over the byre roofs, the roaring
in the telephone wires, the shrill whistling
in the tiles on night’s roof
and the tree tossing helplessly.
A wail of bagpipes is let loose! A wail
of bagpipes keeping step! Liberators.
A procession. A forest on the march!
A bow wave seethes and darkness stirs,
and land and water move. And the dead,
hidden under deck, they are with us,
with us on the way: a voyage, a journey
which is no wild rush but gives security.
And the world is always taking down its tent
anew. One summer day the wind takes hold
of the oak’s rigging, hurls Earth forward.
The lily paddles with its hidden webbed foot
in the pond’s embrace—the pond which is in flight.
A boulder rolls away in the halls of space.
In the summer twilight islands seem to rise
on the horizon. Old villages are on
their way, retreating further into woods
on the seasons’ wheels with magpie creaking.
When the year kicks off its boots, and the sun
climbs higher, the trees break out in leaves
and take the wind and sail out in freedom.
Below the mountain breaks the pinewood surf,
but summer’s long warm groundswell comes,
flows through the treetops slowly, rests
a moment, sinks away again—
a leafless coast remains. And finally:
God’s spirit, like the Nile: flooding
and sinking in a rhythm calculated
in texts from many epochs.
But He is also the immutable
and thus observed here seldom. It’s from
the side He crosses the procession’s path.
As when the steamer passes through the mist,
the mist that does not notice. Silence.
Faint glimmer of the lantern is the signal.
SECRETS ON THE WAY
HEMLIGHETER PÅ VÄGEN
1958
• I •
Solitary Swedish Houses
A confusion of black spruce
and smoking moonbeams.
Here’s the cottage lying low
and not a sign of life.
Till the morning dew murmurs
and an old man opens
—with a shaky hand—his window
and lets out an owl.
Further off, the new building
stands steaming
with the laundry butterfly
fluttering at the corner
in the middle of a dying wood
where the moldering reads
through spectacles of sap
the proceedings of the bark-drillers.
Summer with flaxen-haired rain
or one solitary thundercloud
above a barking dog.
The seed is kicking inside the earth.
Agitated voices, faces
fly in the telephone wires
on stunted rapid wings
across the moorland miles.
The house on an island in the river
brooding on its stony foundations.
Perpetual smoke—they’re burning
the forest’s secret papers.
The rain wheels in the sky.
The light coils in the river.
Houses on the slope supervise
the waterfall’s white oxen.
Autumn with a gang of starlings
holding dawn in check.
The people move stiffly
in the lamplight’s theater.
Let them feel without alarm
the camouflaged wings
and God’s energy
coiled up in the dark.
The Man Who Awoke with Singing over the Roofs
Morning. May rain. The city is still quiet
as a mountain hamlet. The streets quiet. And in
the sky a bluish-green aero-engine rumbles. —
The window is open.
The dream where the sleeper is lying prostrate
turns transparent. He stirs, begins
groping for attention’s instruments—
almost in space.
Weather Picture
The October sea glistens coldly
with its dorsal fin of mirages.
Nothing is left that remembers
the white dizziness of yacht races.
An amber glow over the village.
And all sounds in slow flight.
A dog’s barking is a hieroglyph
painted in the air above the garden
where the yellow fruit outwits
the tree and drops of its own accord.
The Four Temperaments
The probing eye turns the sun’s rays into police batons.
And in the evening: the hubbub from a party in the room below
sprouts up through the floor like unreal flowers.
Driving on the plain. Darkness. The coach seemed stuck on the spot.
An anti-bird screeched in starry emptiness.
The albino sun stood over tossing dark seas.
•
A man like an uprooted tree with croaking foliage
and lightning at attention saw the beast-smelling
sun rise up among pattering wings on the world’s
rocky island surging ahead behind banners of foam through night
and day with white sea birds howling
on the deck and all with a ticket to Chaos.
•
You need only close your eyes to hear plainly
the gulls’ faint Sunday over the sea’s endless parish.
A guitar begins twanging in the thicket and the cloud dawdles
slowly as the green sledge of late spring
—with the whinnying light in the shafts—
comes gliding on the ice.
•
Woke with my girl’s heels clopping in the dream
and outside two snowdrifts like winter’s abandoned gloves
while leaflets from the sun cascaded over the city.
The road never comes to an end. The horizon rushes ahead.
The birds shake in the tree. The dust whirls around the wheels.
All the rolling wheels that contradict death!
Caprichos
It’s getting dark in Huelva: sooty palm trees
and the train whistle’s flurrying
silver-white bats.
The streets have been filled up with people.
And the woman hurrying in the throng cautiously weighs
the last daylight on the balance of her eyes.
The office windows are open. You can still hear
how the horse is tramping inside.
The old horse with the rubber-stamp hooves.
Not till midnight are the streets empty.
At last in all the offices: it’s blue.
Up there in space:
trotting silently, sparkling and black,
unseen and unbound,
having thrown its rider:
a new constellation I call “The Horse.”
• II •
Siesta
The stones’ Whitsun. And with sparkling tongues . . .
The city without weight in the midday hours.
Burials in simmering light. The drum which drowns
locked-in eternity’s pounding fists.
The eagle rises and rises over the sleepers.
Sleep where the mill wheel turns like thunder.
Tramping from the horse with blindfolded eyes.
Locked-in eternity’s pounding fists.
The sleepers hang like weights in the tyrants’ clock.
The eagle drifts dead in the sun’s streaming white current.
And echoing in time—as in Lazarus’s coffin—
locked-in eternity’s pounding fists.
Izmir at Three O’Clock
Just ahead in the almost empty street
two beggars, one without legs—
he’s carried on the other one’s back.
They stood—as on a midnight road an animal
stands blinded staring into the headlights—
for one moment before passing on
and scuttled across the street like boys
in a playground while the midday heat’s
myriad of clocks ticked in space.
Blue flowed past on the waters, flickering.
Black crept and shrank, stared from stone.
White blew up to a storm in the eyes.
When three o’clock was tramped under hooves
and darkness pounded in the wall of light
the city lay crawling at the sea’s door
gleaming in the vulture’s telescopic sight.
• III •
Secrets on the Way
Daylight struck the face of a man who slept.
His dream was more vivid
but he did not wake.
Darkness struck the face of a man who walked
among the others in the sun’s strong
impatient rays.
It was suddenly dark, like a downpour.
I stood in a room that contained every moment—
a butterfly museum.
And the sun still as strong as before.
Its impatient brushes were painting the world.
Tracks
2 AM: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town,
flickering coldly at the horizon.
As when someone has fallen into a dream so deep
he’ll never remember having been there
when he comes back to his room.
As when someone has fallen into an illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny on the horizon.
The train is standing quite still.
2 AM: bright moonlight, few stars.
Kyrie
Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.
A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets
in blindness and anxiety on the way toward a miracle,
while I invisibly remain standing.
As the child falls asleep in terror
listening to the heart’s heavy tread.
Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.
• IV •
A Man from Benin
(On a photograph of a fifteenth-century relief in bronze
from the African state of Benin, showing a Portuguese Jew.)
When darkness fell I was still
but my shadow pounded
against the drumskin of hopelessness.
When the pounding began to ease
I saw the image of an image
of a man coming forward
in the emptiness, a page
lying open.
Like going past a house
long since abandoned
and someone appears at the window.
A stranger. He was the navigator.
He seemed to take notice.
Came nearer without a step.
In a hat that shaped itself
imitating our hemisphere
with the brim at the equator.
The hair parted in two fins.
The beard hung curled
around his mouth like eloquence.
He held his right arm bent.
It was thin like a child’s.
The falcon that should have had its place
on his arm grew out
from his features.
He was the ambassador.
Interrupted in the middle of a speech
which the silence continues
even more forcibly.
Three peoples were silent in him.
He was the image of three peoples.
A Jew from Portugal,
who sailed away with the others,
the drifting and the waiting ones,
the hunched-up flock
in the caravel that was
their rocking wooden mother.
Landfall in a strange air
which made the atmosphere furry.
Observed in the marketplace
by the African castmaker.
Long in his eyes’ quarantine.
Reborn in the race of metal:
“I am come to meet him
who raises his lantern
to see himself in me.”
Balakirev’s Dream
(1905)
The black grand piano, the gleaming spider
trembled at the center of its net of music.
In the concert hall a land was conjured up
where stones were no heavier than dew.
But Balakirev dozed off during the music
and dreamed a dream about the czar’s droshky.
It rumbled over the cobblestones
straight into the crow-cawing blackness.
He sat alone inside the cab and looked
and also ran alongside on the road.
He knew the journey had lasted long
and his watch showed years, not hours.
There was a field where the plow lay
and the plow was a fallen bird.
There was an inlet where the vessel lay
icebound, lights out, with people on deck.
The droshky glided there across the ice
and the wheels spun with a sound of silk.
A lesser battleship: Sebastopol.
He was aboard. The crew gathered around.
“You won’t die if you can play.”
They showed him a curious instrument.
Like a tuba, or a phonograph,
or a part of some unknown machine.
Stiff with fear and helpless he knew: it is
the instrument that drives the man-of-war.
He turned toward the nearest sailor,
made signs despairingly, and begged:
“Cross yourself, like me, cross yourself!”
The sailor stared sadly like a blind man,
stretched out his arms, sank his head—
he hung as if nailed in the air.
The drums beat. The drums beat. Applause!
Balakirev woke from his dream.
The wings of applause pattered in the hall.
He saw the man at the grand piano rise.
Outside the streets lay darkened by the strike.
The droshkies were rushing through the dark.
• V •
After an Attack
The sick boy.
Locked in a vision
with his tongue stiff as a horn.
He sits with his back turned to the picture of the cornfield.
The bandage around his jaw hinting at embalming.
His glasses are thick like a diver’s. And everything is unanswered
and vehement like the telephone ringing in the dark.
But the picture behind him—a landscape that gives peace though the grain is a golden storm.
Sky like blueweed and drifting clouds. Beneath in the yellow surge
some white shirts are sailing: reapers—they cast no shadows.
There’s a man standing far across the field and he seems to be looking this way.
A broad hat darkens his face.
He seems to be observing the dark figure here in the room, perhaps to help.
Imperceptibly the picture has begun widening and opening behind the sick brooding
invalid. It sparks and pounds. Every grain is ablaze to rouse him!
The other—in the corn—gives a sign.
He has come close.
No one notices.
• VI •
The Journey’s Formulae
(from the Balkans, 1955)
1
A murmur of voices behind the plowman.
He doesn’t look around. The empty fields.
A murmur of voices behind the plowman.
One by one the shadows break loose
and plunge into the summer sky’s abyss.
2
Four oxen come, under the sky.
Nothing proud about them. And the dust thick
as wool. The insects’ pens scrape.
A swirl of horses, lean as in
grey allegories of the plague.
Nothing gentle about them. And the sun raves.
3
The stable-smelling village with thin dogs.
The party official in the market square
in the stable-smelling village with white houses.
His heaven accompanies him: it is high
and narrow like inside a minaret.
The wing-trailing village on the hillside.
4
An old house has shot itself in the forehead.
Two boys kick a ball in the twilight.
A swarm of rapid echoes. —Suddenly, starlight.
5
On the road in the long darkness. My wristwatch
gleams obstinately with time’s imprisoned insect.
The quiet in the crowded compartment is dense.
In the darkness the meadows stream past.
But the writer is halfway into his image, there
he travels, at the same time eagle and mole.
PRISON
FÄNGELSE
1959
NINE HAIKU FROM HÄLLBY YOUNG OFFENDERS’ PRISON
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Page 4
