Dust comes and settles on piano lids in arts centres, old Bibles in attics, shelves, rugs, laundries, smithies, abandoned mills,
in old outbuildings where old wooden bowls stand, yarn windles, dismantled looms and chests full of balls of rags.
I, too, want peace. That is why I encounter dust so often.
I love to visit laundries, smithies, abandoned mills and old outhouses.
I believe that time moves more slowly there, and thoughts or images or whatever one should call them sink in slower time slowly to the ground.
Sometimes onto this paper here, and so sometimes they can be called writing, a text.
Before time breaks in the doors and something remains hopelessly unfinished,
the castle in the air unbuilt, the train of thought unspun, the mind unclarified.
Only over paper does time not have great power.
Sometimes something remains there.
Like, for example:
3
Peace conquers everything.
Peace hoists the flag of peace
over chimney, sauna, garden,
campfires, Pond Hill,
where once the Southern and Northern Kingdoms
waged war all summer long.
All is full of peace,
car, outbuilding, sauna, shed, byre, privy,
beehives, nesting-boxes, bath, washbasin,
ash bucket, wheelbarrow, flowerpots, paint tins,
baskets, barrels, pockets and plates.
My own disquiet no longer
finds a place to be,
there is no longer room for it anywhere
except in words;
my restlessness can
now exist only
in heart and poetry.
Poetry is an extension of the heart,
an extension of its beating
into trees, bushes,
apple blossom, scarlet grosbeaks,
spider’s thread, clotheslines.
4
PEACE
is when everything slowly grows its roots,
this old outbuilding, this greenhouse,
this rhubarb clump, which I planted the day before yesterday,
this old iron, this old samovar,
those little vases Tiia made,
this empty matchbox,
this figure carved from limewood,
this pebble, brought from Saaremaa, full of fossilised snails’ shells,
this kantele, which we found in an empty house,
this little mouse, which runs under the loom from one wall to the other,
this spider, which waits on the dusty windowpane,
this old, white button on the windowsill,
this fork, which came to light as we dug the garden,
these apple trees, those garden posts, those laths, those trellises,
those wall logs, dead these sixty years,
those shingles, which we cut at the Sahkri sawmill –
all these are gradually growing roots.
I, too.
5
The spider has sucked dry
one more fly
Life-sap changes owner.
The affinity of everything for everything,
the war of everything against everything,
the great festival of creation
in which everything is, in turn,
the eater and the eaten
and what succeeds in escaping
sinks into the sand or the mire
and eventually becomes coal
and instead of burning
in someone’s innards
it burns in a central heating furnace
one February afternoon,
when the tit sings for the first time
and the red sun begins to set
in the southwest behind the radar and the forest.
6
The white wagtail flies
in the wind to the swaying wire,
finds its balance
and sings its brief, passionate song.
The rain has stopped for a moment,
only
here and there, from the leaves of an apple tree,
a few drops fall and, caught by a drop,
a few white petals fall
down onto the black peat heap.
7
The cuckoo, the clock of springtime,
behind the marsh in the birch grove:
tick-tock
cuck-oo
strikes, as if with an axe,
shavings from the side of time.
My son makes a boat
and cuts his finger again.
The drop of blood marks
the present moment,
the moment of free fall
when all are equal –
the stone and the feather,
the beggar and the king,
the gnat and the poet,
the yarn windle and the bootjack.
The future – a great black hole
in a black void.
I do not see it,
do not feel its weight.
8
The rain is like the centipede
who began to think
how it is he walked
and could not continue his journey.
Again and again the drops fall
onto the same
flowers, leaves, twigs,
but the sun moves on
somewhere in the upper air.
Looms and shadows
stand still,
the spider in its net-corner
and the whistle in the mouth of the warbler.
Only thought moves
and the gooseberries swell
against the autumn
which one can still say is
far off.
It is good that one’s eyes
do not look backward
inside oneself
and that grey hairs
are no heavier to bear
than black ones.
9
Three spiders
have divided between them
the four panes of the window,
the transparent landscape,
in whose background
in the third dimension
the apple tree blossoms
and the leaves of the snowberry
palpitate under the rain-
drops.
On the windowsill
a pair of dried wings.
One dried butterfly.
10
On the other side of the garden, behind the streaming rain,
on the wall of the room
tick the grandfather clock and the electricity meter,
never catching each other up.
The radio is still playing
Schubert’s unfinished symphony,
the voice of the rain fills the pauses,
the silence the voice of the rain.
No one knows where they come from.
No one knows where they go.
But we are ourselves
differently from music,
differently from the rain.
For we do not, really, live –
life lives in us
like fire in a burning field
leaping from stem to stem.
Perhaps somewhere someone
is turning a cornfield into an assart,
sowing seeds in the ashes.
But that
is already beyond my understanding.
11
What, after all, can I write?
About what was – memories.
About what could come to be – dreams.
I do not want either.
I want to write
above all about what is.
About the present. But the present is
the meeting of two walls – the very same
memories and dreams. And between them
is only a corner, too tight
to write i
n it, it is.
Now I understand:
I stand once more in the corner
as once in University Street
and want to believe that from there
from that elusive hue
a door opens to somewhere else
somewhere far away.
12
When you write, you have died a little.
If you want to write about life
it is difficult to grasp it
and live.
You have stepped away from life:
instead of living, you write;
if you want to be honest,
you must write about writing,
about how you write instead of living,
about how you write about
how you write instead of living,
the same again here, the same again
about the same again.
You want to draw a line through everything
which would lead to that same
nonexistent present
point.
In the belief that through the point
passes yet another line, the door to
the other side.
In the old outbuilding
where I sit at an old table
and where there is suddenly
so much silence and space.
13
Go, go, says the easing rain.
Away, away, says the easing rain.
A petal from the apple tree falls onto the grass.
Beauty cuts deeply like a knife,
cuts the personality into many pieces.
One self thinks suddenly of November,
of the first snow, which is
like an old lady’s clean white net curtain,
only on the other side of the window.
A second self thinks of tiredness,
of how the garden is tired, the house is tired,
the bushes are tired, the flowerbeds are tired,
you yourself are tired, tired of life, existence,
expectation, of getting up and going
into that tired world.
But a third self suddenly realises:
sometimes one can also grow tired of being tired.
When I open the door, raindrops are no longer
falling from the sky. In the southwest the sun glimmers
through a thin cloud. Water drips from the eaves,
but one large bee
is already spinning out from under the outhouse eaves.
I put on my rubber boots and realise
that the world is at the same time
very old and very young
and I myself am neither.
*
The Forest Floor
1
The wind blows high above.
Below, under the birch trees and the raspberry canes
the dusk grows gradually
from which anonymous birds
launch into flight
and disappear into the thicket.
The summer builds, in the timber frame,
a multistoreyed postmodern house
whose inhabitants
do not really know one another.
Seldom does he who lives under the tussock
meet the resident of the tree top.
The ecological thread
which binds everything to everything else
is too long
and too fine.
You come here – you are a stranger.
Here, different laws and relationships hold good.
We may have christened them, but that does not concern them,
they do not know it.
Linnaea borealis knows nothing of Carolus Linnaeus.
It just grows.
Three pine trees, grown together.
You lean against one of them – the trunk is still warm.
The cooling of the air has not yet reached them,
although the stones are already chilled.
A solitary, sickly, congealing gnat
takes its opportunity and lands on the back of your hand.
2
A pile of stones.
Slowly covered by twigs, leaves and moss, until all that is left of it is a mound.
Each stone has its own face, its own colour.
Perhaps they have names and personalities, too, but they are so slow.
Perhaps 11,000 years – about how long it is since the retreating glacier left them here – is not enough for them to gain a clear idea of their identity, to realise their own individuality, their separation from the grey womb of the Northlands from which they were once pulled forth.
We may say we are one with creation, but do we really understand what it means.
We are intruders here, we are very far from those who are at home here.
Like the wood horsetail, which spreads its soft sunshade over the rotting leaves.
Like the wood sorrel, whose flowers are as sour as its leaves.
Like the bilberry, which by springtime has forgotten everything, whose young naïve sprigs are full of optimism and curiosity.
Like the lingonberry – dark and solemn, Juhan Liiv-like, Paul-Eerik Rummo-like, which remembers everything and dares not rise too high,
the lingonberry, the real master, who moves to the forest when the forest is ready.
But Linnaea, the twinflower, has begun to move.
I guessed it long ago, I noticed it first.
The twinflower is enlarging its territory, it advances about half a metre a year.
Perhaps its speed will gradually grow – I do not know.
In any case, it has plenty of time, and it will be difficult for anyone to try to keep it from advancing.
I believe it intends to conquer the whole world – which perhaps does indeed belong to it.
3
For a couple of days we all ate young spruce tips, so that our mouths became tender.
And so the summer is at hand.
On the road, by the ditch, a couple of burnt stones from our sauna have crumbled to sand.
On the path grow rushes: a couple of patches of dark, stiff green – like pieces of old horsehair mattress.
At the edge of the forest, in the middle of a footpath, a solitary strawberry blooms, its flower turned towards the south, towards the sun and the open country.
In the dike a stream murmurs and grows spring moss.
Around the forked birch is grass, full of cowslips, like brass key-blanks in a locksmith’s drawer.
Which is the true key of the sky?
Blue moor grass and bird’s-eye primroses together, as if they were well acquainted with the work of Lippmaa and others on plant association in Estonia.
Amid the ruins of a hay barn between the nettles and the meadowsweet, a solitary dandelion blooms, this year for the first time.
Beauty scratches, like a puppy at a door – when it gets out, it wants in, when it gets in, it wants out –
so that it no longer knows which side it is on,
does not know which is the most painful and essential of all,
the yearning to see it all to the core, to crawl free of oneself, to crumble to dust in all those sky-keys, bird’s-eye primroses, rushes, nettles and dandelions
or to scoop them together, whether in photographs, poems or memories, store them up, pass them on to someone who is in need of them
and feel how he begins to come alive again,
to sense the scent of young nettles and streams and the touch of the evening breeze
as I step over the river marsh towards the forest.
*
Dust. I Myself
I, too, was born of the longing of dust.
Dust wants to live.
Dust wants to dance, sing, dust wants eyes, a mouth, backbone and intestines, dust wants to speak of its longing for life and light,
of how it is weary of being dust.
Dust speaks and whimpers even as dust, but its words and voice, t
oo, are merely dust,
so that it is difficult for us to say which is which.
Which is dust, which voice, which yearning,
which am I, which are we.
Am I a speck of dust or its voice, another speck of dust?
A speck of dust, or its longing to be something else?
Am I silence or voice, dust’s silence or its voice,
which contains everything from Gilgamesh to the sorrows of young Werther?
From Gilgamesh, who wanted to know Earth’s law,
although he who comes to know Earth’s law is left weeping on the ground.
Enkidu, who was already dust once more, spoke to him:
‘Did you see him whom the mast killed?’ ‘I saw him,
he is under the earth and is dragging forth posts.’
‘Did you see him who died…?’ ‘I saw him,
he sleeps in the bed of night and drinks fresh water.’
‘Did you see him who was killed in battle?’ ‘I saw him;
his father and mother comfort him
and his wife bends over him.’
‘Did you see him whose body was thrown on to the wasteland?’ ‘I saw him;
his soul beneath the Earth does not rest in peace.’
‘Did you see him whose soul is not honoured?’ ‘I saw him;
he eats scrapings from the pot and crumbs of bread
which have been thrown into the street.’
2
But you, spermatozoon, semen.
You, too, received your longing from somewhere, your longing for the warm, dark primal fluid
in which your, my, our ancestors, once swam, divided, and united again.
The sea. Thalassa. Thalatta.
The sea, of which so little now remains.
Sometimes it is memory, sometimes our own blood.
Sometimes sea water, which in Norway during the war was used
for blood transfusions, when there was not enough blood.
Sometimes it is a warm, salty source in a woman’s, your body, in which once again the miracle of union recurs.
Selected Poems Page 6
