stood in the western sky and beside it
a single star. I showed them to my son
and explained how the moon should be greeted
and that this star is the moon’s servant.
As we neared home, he said
that the moon is far, as far
as that place where we went.
I told him the moon is much, much farther
and reckoned: if one were to walk
ten kilometres each day, it would take
almost a hundred years to reach the moon.
But this was not what he wanted to hear.
The road was already almost dry.
The river was spread on the marsh; ducks and other waterfowl
crowed the beginning of night. The snow’s crust
crackled underfoot – it must
have been freezing again. All the houses’ windows
were dark. Only in our kitchen
a light shone. Beside our chimney, the shining moon,
and beside the moon, a single star.
*
My little daughter, with both her hands, is strewing
white sawdust on white birchbark.
The wind is blowing from the southwest. Everything
is suddenly so full of this wind
and of this autumn. It is as if
the movement of the clouds has
at last moved something that until now
did not stir, was in blossom, was lush and green. Everywhere
such clarity that oblivion finds no place.
Barberries on thorny twigs.
Nettles near the barn door already yellow.
But the birchbark and the fresh sawdust
under the saw and in the tiny palm of the child
suddenly so much more white and clean than before.
*
To write more. To speak more. To whom?
How? Why? What sense does it make? Soon
we may be forced into silence. Soon
we may be forced to speak more
and more loudly. Who knows. But what
remains unspoken is always the most important:
this little man, this child, this
word, thought, and look of a child
deep inside you, you must guard,
you must defend and cherish.
And with it you will learn to speak,
and with it you will learn to be silent
if you must.
*
On the other side of the window, on the other side of the pylon,
of the dung barrow and snowberry bush,
on the other side of the barn roof where southwest wind
for the third day is scattering ash leaves;
on the other side of the Crincels apple tree,
of the raspberries and of the spruce hedge,
on the other side of the foggy field, of the forest and clouds,
of the autumn, of the sky, of the wind,
on the other side of this life, here,
suddenly, a lone tardy dandelion
unfolds and takes
thoughts from my head and words from my mouth.
*
There is no Good, no Evil, no Sin, no Virtue,
no Faithfulness, no Unfaithfulness, no Marriage, no Adultery.
There is also no Love, although sometimes
these and other words are spoken or written
on paper, on sand, into stone or wind.
There is only the great soul which has
no greatness nor smallness, something
between thoughts and entrails that sometimes starts
as I see you gathering apples under an apple tree
or cutting our little boy’s hair or taking
off your nightgown, and I do not know
whether the echo of this beginning will ever end.
*
Four-and-a-half tons of Silesian coal –
a whole day to shovel it into the cellar,
a whole winter to burn it. I’m happy to have it,
and – as always – I regret a little
that I must burn something so wonderful
without having time to study it, to open layer by layer
the book that has been buried and hidden for so long.
I understand almost nothing of these
single lumps that bear distinct
traces of leaves or bark from ancient trees.
Always a book, a black book in a foreign language
from which I understand only some single words:
Cordaites, Bennetites, Sigillaria, Sigillaria…
*
Once while carrying coal ash and used paint drums to the dustbin
I remembered it once more: there is
no difference between the common and the strange.
If there is any difference, it is only in ourselves, in our eyes.
For God, it is as common to create or to destroy worlds
as it is for us to write a letter or to read
editorials or the obit page. To himself,
God is no God. To ourselves, we are gods.
In this sense, there is no God. There are
eyes, eyes where a rusty oil barrel takes tender white roots,
and yesterday’s newspaper bursts into bloom
and moths swarm around it till dawn.
*
People were coming from the market carrying plum trees;
white lines were being drawn on the asphalt.
Going home, I saw once more
the white tortured trunks of birches
and their foliage breaking out in leaves
and the clouded sky reflected in floodwater pools,
I suddenly felt that this beauty
was becoming almost unsupportable –
it’s better to look on ground where charming
tiny burdocks, nettles and mugworts
are coming up
or go indoors and find in the dictionaries
what, after all, are the meanings of Japanese words,
yugen, sabi, and mono-no-aware:
obscurity, mystery,
and charm or sadness for what is.
*
Sometimes I see so clearly the openness of things.
The teapot has no lid, the colt has no saddle.
Black horses come racing out of memory
carrying young boys on their backs and rush over
the empty steppe and through the haze
through which we see, dimly,
some single peaks…. I too have come from there.
I have something of you, my forefathers,
Amurat, Ahmed, Tokhtash, something of you
black Tartar horses on boundless expanses.
I too do not like to return
to lived life, to an extinguished fire,
to a thought thought to a written poem.
I am burning with the same urge to reach the Atlantic,
to reach the borders always vanishing and breaking
in front of the black horses who again and again
race out from memories and steppes
smelling the west wind that brings from somewhere very far
the odour of the sea and rain.
*
It gets cold in the evening. The sky clears.
The wind dies out, and the smoke
rises straight up. The flowering maple
no longer buzzes. A carp
plops in the pond. An owl hoots twice
in its nest in the ash tree.
The children are asleep. On the stairs,
a long row of shoes and rubber boots.
It happened near Viljandi: an imbecile boy
poured gasoline on the neighbour’s three-year-old son
and set him on fire. I ran for milk.
You could see the yellow maple from far off
between the birches and the spruce. The evening star
was shining above the
storehouse. The boy survived,
probably maimed for life. The night will bring frost.
Plentiful dew.
*
A piebald cat
sits alone in the middle of the mown field
waiting for something, perhaps a mouse,
perhaps for darkness. We all
wait for the rain. Clouds came and went;
in the morning, it drizzled, but then the wind rose
and raged until noon, drying
even that scant moisture. The village people
grumble that their cattle have hardly anything to eat.
Time moves sideways, looking at this
empty land above which
warm south winds sweep and buzzards
shriek. No longer summer. Nor autumn yet.
*
The early autumn, a faded aquarelle,
becoming more and more colourless and depthless.
Big clumsy flies creeping through window slits
into our rooms, unable to get out again,
as every autumn. From evening to evening,
clouds gather, but there is no dew at night. Jays
pick last peas in the garden.
Thrushes perch in flocks on rowan trees.
Everything seen and known before. The long drought
leaves its traces in our face and mind,
and it is difficult to believe that there is something new
under the sun save the wind and deceptive clouds,
meteor flashes in the night sky and some
chance things you happen to see and remember as with this
earwig that for a long while was turning around
on the gravel path in front of our house.
*
The crop is reaped and mice are coming in from the fields
to the farmhouse, and the owls follow them in.
Sometimes in the evening they call one another
from one corner of the garden to another. I found
a butterfly with worn-out wings in the grass – it could not
fly any more. One night while I went out to pee,
I saw the Milky Way for the first time. A nutcracker
shrieked in the hazel hedge – the nuts are ripe.
The wasps abandoned their nests. They are flying
and feasting, slipping into beehives,
into jam cans and overripe apples;
and grasshoppers are sawing in the grass and on the trees
more and more loudly, and dolorous
as the summer’s last string knowing it will break.
*
Poetry is verdant – in spring
it is born from each raindrop, each
ray of light falling on the ground.
How much room do we have for them
between a morning and an evening
or upon a page in a book?
But now, in autumn when black clouds
slide low above us, brushing
high-tension pylons and crows
dozing there in the dusk, because
there is hardly day at all, the night is
two long black fingers holding day
and us in a grip so tight we barely have
room to breathe or think. Everything I write
is in spite of this weight
that comes, comes again, wanting
to plunge us into sleep,
into the dreams of decaying leaves and grassroots
and of the earth itself where
all our unthought thoughts and unborn poems hide.
*
Silence of night. A cockroach
comes out from under the bathtub
in a fifteenth-storey flat; the switch
is out of order, and the lamp
often lights itself.
It climbs up the wall and stops
on the shelf just above the sink. Who knows why.
Perhaps the smell of odours oozing
from bottles, gallipots, and tubes with inscriptions
Wars After Shave Spartacus Sans Soucis Bocage
Arcancil Exotic Intim Desodor Pound’s Cream
Cocoa Butter Pond’s Dry Skin Cream Maquimat
Avon Chic Privileg Fath de Fath Aramis
Savon Ambre Ancien eau de Cologne…
Perhaps it has an inkling of something
great and mysterious, of a transcendental reality
behind these colourful labels or perhaps
the odours have simply obliterated other traces of smell
from its path leading into the socket hole and from there
into the kitchen behind the breadbox.
*
We always live our childhood again.
Even then, we don’t want it back.
Like me. In each year-before-last’s memory
is something melancholy and oppressive, probably
war and oppression’s shadow from which it was so difficult,
almost impossible to get free, and still
some hazy sadness. I believe that only as a man
have I known joy, and only then,
when I began to write, the mist cleared away
and these shadows. Even from memory,
the essential is born pure:
air, water, earth, trees and houses,
and old walkway slabs on streets in suburbia
poured from concrete or cut from flat, natural stone.
Neither the eyes nor the soles of the feet have forgotten them,
and when I see them again, they are cold and soft
and pedestrians’ feet have pressed them still further into a slope
so that with a child’s carriage or crutches
it is already difficult to travel
Jaama, Liiva or Tähtvere streets.
What will become of them? Will anyone
make them neatly level again,
or will they be covered with asphalt, and wheels
roll more easily over our childhood
paths and memories.
*
Dialectics is a dialogue, a play of shadows
with somebody darker than darkness
whose eye sees nothing and whose ear hears nothing.
Only sometimes it stretches its hand,
as dark as itself and imperceptibly soft,
and scatters all our cards and pieces,
our formulae, theories, religion and atheism,
and we must begin anew,
until its hand or breath once again
overturns everything
or understand that it is
permanent otherness, nothing but Something Else.
*
Destruktivität ist das Ergebnis ungelebten Lebens.
Destructivity is the result of an unlived life.
What cannot grow up grows down –
nails and hairs of the beard into the flesh, unrequited desires
calcifying our blood vessels, envy
changing into ulcers, sadness into lice,
dirt into flies. We are always,
in a way, wandering knights; we are always looking
for what to fight for and against, whom
to hate with a just hatred. This unlived life
is like a boiling water pot in our hands
which we hurry to put away, and there
is no time for anything else, and we are angry
at all who sit quietly
around the kitchen table and talk
about Erich Fromm and that destructivity
is the result of an unlived life.
*
Elder trees that thrushes have sown
near St Peter’s cemetery under the precipice
are bigger and more abundantly flowered
than last year. Some steps farther,
the ruins of a burnt house
are vanishing under burdock and nettles.
In the garden there are always the same
leafless tre
es – a willow and some apple trees
I tried to draw a year ago
when it was spring, as now, and my mother
was dying in the hospital. The gulls shriek
and boats drone farther up the river.
And in the bushes near the old dump,
the nightingales continue to sing the same
‘lazy girl, lazy girl, where’s the whip, where’s the whip’
as though they had learned nothing
and forgotten nothing.
*
Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
with a picture of sugar-cane harvest. Then I realised
that nothing at all is exotic in itself.
There is no difference between digging potatoes in our Mutiku garden
and sugar-cane harvesting in Viti Levu.
Everything that is is very ordinary
or, rather, neither ordinary nor strange.
Far-off lands and foreign peoples are a dream,
a dreaming with open eyes
somebody does not wake from.
It’s the same with poetry – seen from afar
it’s something special, mysterious, festive,
No, poetry is even less
special than a sugar-cane plantation or potato field.
Poetry is like sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellowish shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.
*
Potatoes are dug, ash trees yellow,
sunflower seeds, ripe apples rotting
under the apple tree – as always,
we have more works than days and something
is always left unharvested, unpicked, unfinished.
The plot has to be dug, the fence needs mending –
then we can go, the sky overcast.
Soon, the leaves will be fallen, soon
the essence of things will be more clearly visible:
the black bare twigs of a lowland birch swaying
on the horizon of a grey twilit sky.
Selected Poems Page 4
