The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
Page 11
Was the letter ever answered? I don’t remember, it was long ago. The countless thresholds of the sea kept migrating. The heart kept leaping from second to second like a toad in the wet grass of an August night.
The unanswered letters pile up, like cirrostratus clouds promising bad weather. They make the sunbeams lusterless. One day I will answer. One day when I am dead and can at last concentrate. Or at least so far away from here that I can find myself again. When I’m walking, newly arrived, in the big city, on 125th Street, in the wind on the street of dancing garbage. I who love to stray off and vanish in the crowd, a capital T in the endless mass of the text.
Icelandic Hurricane
Not earth-tremor but sky-quake. Turner could have painted it, lashed tight. A solitary mitten has just whirled by, several miles from its hand. I am going to make my way against the wind to that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am x-rayed, the skeleton hands in its resignation. Panic grows as I beat upwind, I founder, I founder and drown on dry land! How heavy everything I suddenly have to drag along, how heavy for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final wrestle with the door. And now inside. And now inside. Behind the big glass pane. What a strange and wonderful invention glass is—to be close yet untouched. . . . Outside, a horde of transparent sprinters in giant format charges across the lava plain. But I’m no longer fluttering. I’m sitting behind the glass, at rest, my own portrait.
The Blue Wind-Flowers
To be spellbound—nothing’s easier. It’s one of the oldest tricks of the soil and springtime: the blue wind-flowers. They are in a way unexpected. They shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses. They glimmer and float—yes, float—from their color. The sharp violet-blue now weighs nothing. Here is ecstasy, but low voiced. “Career”— irrelevant! “Power” and “publicity”—ridiculous! They must have given a great reception up in Nineveh, with pompe and “Trompe up!” Raising the rafters. And above all those brows the crowning crystal chandeliers hung like glass vultures. Instead of such an over-decorated and strident cul-de-sac, the wind-flowers open a secret passage to the real celebration, quiet as death.
The Blue House
It is a night of radiant sun. I stand in the dense forest and look away toward my house with its haze-blue walls. As if I had just died and was seeing the house from a new angle.
It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its wood is impregnated with four times joy and three times sorrow. When someone who lived in the house dies, it is repainted. The dead person himself is painting, without a brush, from inside.
Beyond the house, open ground. Once a garden, now grown over. Stationary breakers of weed, pagodas of weed, welling text, Upanishads of weed, a viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, a weed empire!
Across the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang that is thrown again and again. It has something to do with a person who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse comes from him, a thought, a thought like an act of will: “make . . . draw . . .” To reach out of his fate.
The house is like a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness that grew because someone—much too soon—gave up his mission to be a child. Open the door, step in! In here there’s unrest in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed hangs a painting of a ship with seventeen sails, hissing wave crests, and a wind that the gilt frame can’t contain.
It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real.
A ship’s engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew’s magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quite another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.
• III •
Satellite Eyes
The ground is rough, no mirror.
Only the coarsest of spirits
can reflect themselves: the Moon
and the Ice Age.
Come closer in the dragon haze!
Heavy clouds, milling streets.
A rustling downpour of souls.
Barrack squares.
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty
His glance flits in jerks across the newsprint.
Feelings come, so icy they’re taken for thoughts.
Only in deep hypnosis could he be his other I,
his hidden sister, the woman who joins the hundreds of thousands
screaming “Death to the Shah!”—although he is already dead—
a marching black tent, pious and full of hate.
Jihad! Two who shall never meet take the world in hand.
Black Postcards
1
The diary written full, future unknown.
The cable hums the folk song with no home.
Snowfall on the lead-still sea. Shadows
wrestle on the Pier.
2
In the middle of life it happens that death comes
to take man’s measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is sewn on the quiet.
Fire-Jottings
Throughout the dismal months my life sparkled alive only when I made love with you.
As the firefly ignites and fades out, ignites and fades out—in glimpses we can trace its flight
in the dark among the olive trees.
Throughout the dismal months the soul lay shrunken, lifeless,
but the body went straight to you.
The night sky bellowed.
Stealthily we milked the cosmos and survived.
Many Steps
The icons are laid in the earth face up
and the earth trod down again
by wheels and shoes, by thousands of steps,
by the heavy steps of ten thousand doubters.
In my dream I stepped down into a luminous underground pool,
a surging litany.
What sharp longing! What idiotic hope!
And over me the tread of millions of doubters.
Postludium
I drag like a grapnel over the world’s floor—
everything catches that I don’t need.
Tired indignation. Glowing resignation.
The executioners fetch stone. God writes in the sand.
Silent rooms.
The furniture stands in the moonlight, ready to fly.
I walk slowly into myself
through a forest of empty suits of armor.
• IV •
Dream Seminar
Four thousand million on Earth.
They all sleep, they all dream.
Faces throng, and bodies, in each dream—
the dreamt-of people are more numerous
than us. But take no space. . . .
You doze off at the theater perhaps,
in mid-play your eyelids sink.
A fleeting double exposure: the stage
before you outmaneuvered by a dream.
Then no more stage, it’s you.
The theater in the honest depths!
The mystery of the overworked director!
Perpetual memorizing of new plays . . .
A bedroom. Night.
The darkened sky is flowing through the room.
The book that someone fell asleep from lies
still open
sprawling wounded at the edge of the bed.
The sleeper’s eyes are moving,
they’re following the text without letters
in another book—
illuminated, old-fashioned, swift.
A dizzying commedia inscribed
within the eyelids’ monastery walls.
A unique copy. Here, this very moment.
In the morning, wiped out.
The mystery of the great waste!
in uniforms stop the tourist—
open his camera, unwind the film
and let the daylight kill the pictures:
thus dreams are blackened by the light of day.
Annihilated or just invisible?
There is a kind of out-of-sight dreaming
that never stops. Light for other eyes.
A zone where creeping thoughts learn to walk.
Faces and forms regrouped.
We’re moving on a street, among people
in blazing sun.
But just as many—maybe more—
we don’t see
are in dark buildings,
high on both sides.
Sometimes one of them comes to the window
and glances down on us.
Codex
Men of footnotes, not headlines. I find myself in the deep corridor
that would have been dark
if my right hand wasn’t shining like a torch.
The light falls on something written on the wall
and I see it
as the diver sees the name on the sunken hull shimmering toward him in the flowing depths:
ADAM ILEBORGH 1448. Who?
It was he who made the organ spread its clumpy wings and rise—
and it held itself airborne nearly a minute.
An experiment blessed with success!
Written on the wall: MAYONE, DAUTHENDEY, KAMINSKY. . . The light touches name upon name.
The walls are quite scrawled over.
They’re the names of the all-but-extinct artists
the men of footnotes, the unplayed, the half-forgotten, the immortal unknown.
For a moment it feels as if they’re all whispering their names at once—
whispering added to whispering till a tumbling breaker cascades along the corridor
without throwing anyone down.
Though the corridor is no longer a corridor.
Neither a graveyard nor a marketplace but something of both.
A kind of greenhouse, too.
Plenty of oxygen.
Dead men of the footnotes can breathe deeply, they remain in the ecological system.
But there is much they are spared.
They are spared swallowing the morality of power,
they are spared the black-and-white checkered game where the smell of corpses is the only thing that never dies.
They are rehabilitated.
And those who can no longer receive
have not stopped giving.
They rolled out a little of the radiant and melancholy tapestry
and let go again.
Some are anonymous, they are my friends
without my knowing them, they are like those stone people
carved on grave slabs in old churches.
Soft or harsh reliefs in walls we brush against, figures and names
sunk in the stone floors, on the way to extinction.
But those who really want to be struck from the list . . .
They don’t stop in the region of footnotes,
they step into the downward career that ends in oblivion and peace.
Total oblivion. It’s a kind of exam
taken in silence: to step over the border without anyone noticing. . . .
Carillon
Madame despises her guests because they want to stay at her shabby hotel.
I have the corner room, one floor up: a wretched bed, a lightbulb in the ceiling.
Heavy drapes where a quarter of a million mites are on the march.
Outside: a pedestrian street
with slow tourists, hurrying schoolchildren, men in working clothes who wheel their rattling bikes.
Those who think they make the earth go round and those who think they go round helplessly in earth’s grip.
A street we all walk, where does it emerge?
The room’s only window faces something else: The Wild Market Square,
ground that seethes, a wide trembling surface, at times crowded and at times deserted.
What I carry within me is materialized—all terrors, all expectations.
All the inconceivable that will nevertheless happen.
I have low beaches; if death rises six inches I shall be flooded.
I am Maximilian. It’s 1488. I’m held prisoner here in Bruges
because my enemies are irresolute—
they are wicked idealists and what they did in horror’s backyard I can’t describe, I can’t turn blood into ink.
I am also the man in overalls wheeling his rattling bike down the street.
I am also the person seen, that tourist, the one loitering and pausing, loitering and pausing
and letting his gaze wander over the pale moon-tanned faces and surging draperies of old paintings.
No one decides where I go, least of all myself, though each step is where it must be.
Walking around in the fossil wars where all are invulnerable because all are dead!
The dusty foliage, the walls with their loopholes, the garden paths where petrified tears crunch under the heels . . .
Unexpectedly, as if I’d stepped on a tripwire, the bell-ringing starts in the anonymous tower.
Carillon! The sack splits along its seams and the chimes roll out across Flanders.
Carillon! The cooing iron of the bells, hymn and hit song in one, written in the air, trembling.
The shaky-handed doctor wrote a prescription that no one can decipher but his writing will be recognized. . . .
Over meadow and rooftop, harvest and mart,
over quick and dead the carillon rings.
Christ and Antichrist, hard to tell apart!
The bells bear us home at last on their wings.
They have stopped.
I am back in the hotel room: the bed, the light, the drapes. Strange noises—the cellar is dragging itself up the stairs.
I lie on the bed with my arms outstretched.
I am an anchor that has dug itself down and holds steady
the huge shadow floating up there
the great unknown that I am a part of and which is certainly more important than me.
Outside: the walkway, the street where my steps die away and also what is written, my preface to silence and my inside-out psalm.
Molokai
We stand at the edge and deep down under us glisten the roofs of the leper colony.
The climb down we could manage but we’d never make it back up the slopes before nightfall.
So we turn back through the forest, walk among trees with long blue needles.
It’s silent here, like the silence when the hawk nears.
These are woods that forgive everything but forget nothing.
Damien, for love, chose life and obscurity. He received death and fame.
But we see these events from the wrong side: a heap of stones instead of the sphinx’s face.
FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
FÖR LEVANDE OCH DÖDA
1989
The Forgotten Captain
We have many shadows. I was walking home
in the September night when Y
climbed out of his grave after forty years
and kept me company.
At first he was quite empty, only a name
but his thoughts swam
faster than time ran
and caught up with us.
I put his eyes to my eyes
and saw war’s ocean.
The last boat he captained
took shape beneath us.
Ahead and astern the Atlantic convoy crept,
the ships that would survive
and the ships that bore the Mark
(invisible to all)
while sleepless days and nights relieved each other
but never him.
Under his oilskin, his life jacket.
He never came home.
It was an
internal weeping that bled him to death
in a Cardiff hospital.
He could at last lie down
and turn into a horizon.
Good-bye, eleven-knot convoys! Good-bye, 1940!
Here ends world history.
The bombers were left hanging.
The heathery moors blossomed.
A photo from early this century shows a beach.
Six Sunday-best boys.
Sailboats in their arms.
What solemn airs!
The boats that became life and death for some of them.
And writing about the dead—
that too is a game, made heavy
with what is to come.
Six Winters
1
In the black hotel a child is asleep.
And outside: the winter night
where the wide-eyed dice roll.
2
An élite of the dead became stone
in Katarina Churchyard
where the wind shakes in its Svalbard armor.
3
One wartime winter when I lay sick
a huge icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbor and harpoon, unexplained memory.
4
Ice hangs down from the roof-edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.
5
On a sidetrack an empty railway carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.
6
Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue.
The Nightingale in Badelunda
In the green midnight at the nightingale’s northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race toward the neon line. The nightingale’s voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cockcrow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn’t notice it then, but I do now. Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tock-thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale’s voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky’s gleaming scythe.