the face a white flag.
The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two returns and one single.
2
One of the palace windows flies open and the people inside grimace in the sudden draft.
Outside on the water the garbage gondola appears, paddled by two one-oared bandits.
Liszt has written some chords that are so heavy they should be sent
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meteorites!
too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink through the future right down
to the years of the brownshirts.
The gondola is heavy-laden with the crouching stones of the future.
3
Peepholes, opening on 1990.
March 25. Anxiety over Lithuania.
Dreamt that I visited a large hospital.
No staff. Everyone a patient.
In the same dream a newborn girl
who spoke in complete sentences.
4
Beside his son-in-law, who is a man of the age, Liszt is a moth-eaten Grand Seigneur.
It’s a disguise.
The deep that tries on and rejects different masks has picked out this one for him.
The deep that wants to step in, to visit the humans, without showing its face.
5
Abbé Liszt is accustomed to carrying his own suitcase through slush and sunshine
and when the time comes to die no one will meet him at the station.
A warm breeze of highly gifted brandy carries him off in the middle of some task.
He is never free of tasks.
Two thousand letters per year!
The schoolboy writing out the misspelled word a hundred times before he can go home.
The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.
6
1990 again.
Dreamt that I drove 200 kilometers for nothing.
Then everything grew large. Sparrows
big as hens sang deafeningly.
Dreamt that I drew piano keys
on the kitchen table. I played on them, silently.
The neighbors came in to listen.
7
The keyboard, which has kept silent through the whole of Parsifal (but it has listened) is at last allowed to say something.
Sighs . . . sospiri . . .
When Liszt plays this evening he holds down the sea-pedal
so that the green power of the sea rises through the floor and merges with the stonework of the building.
Good evening, beautiful deep!
The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black.
8
Dreamt that I was to start school but arrived late.
Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask.
Impossible to tell who the teacher was.
Landscape with Suns
The sun emerges around the house,
stands in the middle of the road
and breathes on us
with its red blast.
Innsbrück I must leave you.
But tomorrow
there will be a glowing sun
in the half-dead grey forest
where we have to work and live.
November in the Former DDR
The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over
and the grass shook itself in the coal dust.
Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams,
we board the train
that stops at every station
and lays eggs.
Almost silent.
The clang of the church bells’ buckets
fetching water.
And someone’s inexorable cough
scolding everything and everyone.
A stone idol moves its lips:
it’s the city.
Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings
among kiosk attendants butchers
metalworkers naval officers
iron-hard misunderstandings, academics!
How sore my eyes are!
They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glowworm lamps.
November offers caramels of granite.
Unpredictable!
Like world history
laughing at the wrong place.
But we hear the clang
of the church bells’ buckets fetching water
every Wednesday
—is it Wednesday?—
so much for our Sundays!
From July 1990
It was a funeral
and I felt the dead man
was reading my thoughts
better than I could.
The organ was silent, the birds sang.
The grave out in the sunshine.
My friend’s voice belonged
on the far side of the minutes.
I drove home seen through
by the glitter of the summer day
by rain and quietness
seen through by the moon.
The Cuckoo
A cuckoo sat hoo-hooing in the birch just north of the house. It was so loud that at first I thought it was an opera singer imitating a cuckoo. I looked at the bird in surprise. Its tail feathers moved up and down to each note like a pump handle. The bird was bouncing on both feet, turning round, and screaming toward every point of the compass. Then it took off, muttering, and flew over the house away to the west. . . . Summer is growing old and everything is flowing into a single melancholy murmur. Cuculus canorus will return to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is over. Its time here was not long! In fact the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire. . . . I am no longer so fond of making journeys. But the journey visits me. Now when I am more and more pushed into a corner, when the annual growth rings multiply, when I need reading glasses. Always there is much more happening than we can bear. There is nothing to be surprised at. These thoughts bear me as faithfully as Susi and Chuma bore Livingstone’s embalmed body right through Africa.
Three Stanzas
1
The knight and his lady
turned to stone but happy
on a flying coffin-lid
outside time.
2
Jesus held up a coin
with Tiberius in profile
a profile without love
power in circulation.
3
A dripping sword
wipes out the memories.
On the ground trumpets
and sword belts rust.
Like Being a Child
Like being a child and a sudden insult
is jerked over your head like a sack
through its mesh you catch a glimpse of the sun
and hear the cherry trees humming.
No help in that—the great insult
covers your head your torso your knees
you can move sporadically
but can’t look forward to spring.
Glimmering woolly hat, pull it down over your face
stare through the stitches.
On the straits the water rings are crowding soundlessly.
Green leaves are darkening the earth.
Two Cities
Each on its side of a strait, two cities
the one blacked out, occupied by the enemy.
In the other the lamps are burning.
The bright shore hypnotizes the dark one.
I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark waters.
A dull tuba blast penetrates.
It’s a friend’s voice, take up your grave and walk.
The Light Streams In
Outside the window, the long beast of spring
the transparent dragon of sunlight
rushes past like an endless
suburban train—we never got a glimpse of its head.
The shoreline villas shuffle sideways
they are proud as crabs.
The sun makes the st
atues blink.
The raging sea of fire out in space
is transformed to a caress.
The countdown has begun.
Night Journey
Thronging under us. The trains.
Hotel Astoria trembles.
A glass of water at the bedside
shines in the tunnels.
He dreamt he was a prisoner on Svalbard.
The planet turned rumbling.
Glittering eyes walked over the ice fields.
The beauty of miracles existed.
Haiku
The power lines stretched
across the kingdom of frost
north of all music.
•
The white sun’s a long-
distance runner against
the blue mountains of death.
•
We have to live with
the small-print grasses and
laughter from the cellar.
•
The sun is low now.
Our shadows are giants.
Soon all will be shadow.
•
The purple orchids.
Oil tankers are gliding past.
The moon’s at the full.
•
Medieval keep.
Alien city, cold sphinx,
empty arenas.
•
The leaves whispering:
a wild boar’s at the organ.
And the bells pealed out.
•
The night flows westwards
horizon to horizon
all at the moon’s speed.
•
The presence of God.
In the tunnel of birdsong
a locked seal opens.
•
Oak trees and the moon.
Light. Silent constellations.
And the cold ocean.
From the Island, 1860
1
One day as she rinsed clothes from the jetty
the chill of the strait rose through her arms
into her life.
Her tears froze into a pair of glasses.
The island raised itself in the grass
and the banner of Baltic herring swayed in the depths.
2
And the swarm of smallpox caught up with him
clustered onto his face.
He lies and stares at the ceiling.
What plying of oars up the silence.
The moment’s eternally running stain
the moment’s eternally bleeding point.
Silence
Walk past, they are buried . . .
A cloud glides across the sun’s disk.
Starvation is a tall building
that moves by night
in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens—
a dark rod pointing to the inner domains.
Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.
Walk past, they are buried . . .
The table-silver survives in big shoals
deep down where the Atlantic is black.
Midwinter
A blue sheen
radiates from my clothes.
Midwinter.
Jangling tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a soundless world
there is a crack
where dead people
are smuggled across the border.
A Sketch from 1844
William Turner’s face is weather-brown.
He has set up his easel far out among the breakers.
We follow the silver-green cable down in the depths.
He wades out in the shelving kingdom of death.
A train rolls in. Come closer.
Rain, rain travels over us.
THE GREAT ENIGMA
DEN STORA GÅTAN
2004
Eagle Rock
Behind the vivarium glass
the reptiles
unmoving.
A woman hangs up washing
in the silence.
Death is becalmed.
In the depths of the ground
my soul glides
silent as a comet.
Façades
1
At road’s end I see power
and it’s like an onion
with overlapping faces
coming loose one by one . . .
2
The theaters are emptied. It’s midnight.
Words blaze on the façades.
The enigma of the unanswered letters
sinks through the cold glitter.
November
When the hangman’s bored he turns dangerous.
The burning sky rolls up.
Tapping sounds can be heard from cell to cell
and space streams up from the ground-frost.
A few stones shine like full moons.
Snow Is Falling
The funerals keep coming
more and more of them
like the traffic signs
as we approach a city.
Thousands of people gazing
in the land of long shadows.
A bridge builds itself
slowly
straight out in space.
Signatures
I have to step
over the dark threshold.
A hall.
The white document gleams.
With many shadows moving.
Everyone wants to sign it.
Until the light overtook me
and folded up time.
Haiku
1
With hanging gardens,
a lama monastery.
Painted battle scenes.
•
Wall of hopelessness . . .
The doves flutter to and fro.
They have no faces.
•
Thoughts standing still, like
the colored mosaic stones in
the palace courtyard.
•
On the balcony
I stand in a cage of sun-
beams—like a rainbow.
•
Humming in the mist.
A fishing boat far from land
—trophy on the waves.
•
Glittering cities:
song, stories, mathematics—
but with a difference.
2
Stag in blazing sun.
The flies sew, sew, fasten that
shadow to the ground.
3
A chill-to-the-bone
wind flows through the house tonight—
names of the demons.
•
Gaunt tousled pine trees
on the same tragic moorland.
Always and always.
•
Borne by the darkness.
I met an immense shadow
in a pair of eyes.
•
The November sun—
my enormous shadow swims
becomes a mirage.
•
Those milestones, always
on their way somewhere. Listen
—a stock dove calling.
•
Death stoops over me.
I’m a problem in chess. He
has the solution.
4
The sun disappears.
The tugboat looks on with its
face of a bulldog.
•
On a rocky ledge
the crack in the charmed cliff shows.
The dream an iceberg.
•
Working up the slopes
in open sunlight—the goats
that foraged on fire.
5
And blueweed, blueweed
keeps rising from the asphalt.
It’s like a beggar.
•
The darkening leaves
in autumn are as
precious
as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
6
Sitting on a shelf
in the library of fools
the sermons untouched.
•
Come out of the swamp!
Sheatfish tremble with laughter
when the pine strikes twelve.
•
My happiness swelled
in those Pomeranian
swamps and the frogs sang.
•
He writes, writes, and writes . . .
Glue floated in the canals.
On the Styx, that barge.
•
Go, quiet as a shower
and meet the whispering leaves.
Hear the Kremlin’s bell!
7
Perplexing forest
where God lives without money.
The walls were shining.
•
Encroaching shadows . . .
We are astray in the woods
in the mushroom clan.
•
Black-and-white magpie
stubbornly running zigzag
right across the fields.
•
See how I’m sitting
like a punt pulled up on land.
Here I am happy.
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Page 13
