But those my aunt met on the streets of German-occupied Tartu,
with a yellow star sewn to their clothes, and to whom
she even dared to speak to the horror of her friends:
they are not here, they are scattered
into nameless graves, ditches and pits
in many places, many countries, homeless in death
as in life. Maybe some of them are hovering
in the air as particles of ash, and have not yet
descended to earth. I’ve thought
that if I were a physicist I would like to study dust,
everything that’s hovering in the air, dancing in sunlight,
getting into eyes and mouths, into the ice of Greenland
or between the books on the shelf. Maybe one day
I would have met you,
Isaac, Mordechai, Sarah, Esther, Sulamith
and whoever you were. Maybe even today I breathed in
something of you with this intoxicating spring air;
maybe a flake of you fell today on the white white
apple blossom in my grandfather’s garden
or on my grey hair.
*
The sky’s overcast. The warm wind creeps under your shirt.
A spotted cat walks slowly towards the dusk.
Dusk moves slowly towards the spotted cat.
A neighbour’s wife is taking clothes from the line.
I don’t see her, I only see the clothes vanishing
one by one. I see the white lilac.
Narcissi and carnations. And lights
shining far away on the other side of the river. One recorder.
One radio. One reed warbler. And many,
many nightingales.
*
Silence is always here and everywhere;
sometimes we simply hear it more clearly:
fog covers the meadow, the barn door is open,
a redwing’s singing over there, a white
moth circles incessantly around the elm branch
and the branch itself is still swaying imperceptibly
against the background of the evening sky.
The dusk robs us all of faces and names,
only the difference between light and dark remains.
The heart of a midsummer’s night:
the old watch on the desk
is suddenly ticking so terribly loudly.
*
This other life only begins in the evening
when the wind dies down, the clouds
gather on the horizon waiting for tomorrow
and the aroma of honeysuckle is flooding
courtyard and garden.
The heron alights at the pond and stays still
waiting. Through the bird cherries
I see something light close to the water,
and somehow it is hard to believe it’s anything other
than just a spot of bright evening sky
reflected on the still surface whose peace
is disturbed only by some water insect
or a line drawn by the dorsal fin
of a carp.
*
I don’t want to write courtly poetry any more,
the poetry of a horseman who sees the world only
from the eyeholes of my helmet
and in whose mind and language the horse-trot has left
its indelible tata-rata, tata-rata,
and who’s always racing over and past everything.
In my life and poetry I’ve always wanted
to be a pedestrian, a wandering scholar who can
sit down on every hillside that’s to his liking,
look at everything he wants to,
look at the bumblebee who searches
each blossom of the red clover in turn
and then follow it with his eyes until it vanishes
in the blue of the summer sky; to stay for a while
without thinking, just like that,
enjoying all this transient beauty
until the cool shadow of a cloud
falls upon me, reminding me
that it’s time to stand up and go: evening
is approaching, I must find accommodation somewhere
and tomorrow at daybreak start again, to reach
the town before the gates close.
Maybe I’ll find some work there
writing letters, composing verse
and teaching Latin to boys (and even girls)
of the better families.
However, a reminiscence of this hillside, this bumblebee
and this shadow of a cloud will remain, and will sometimes
sound in the background of my songs about summer,
about birds singing and, of course, about Venus
and some buxom tavern-maid who was ready
to share with a poor scholar, free, just for a song he made,
what they call love. Yes
in one of my songs I spoke of the bumblebee
on the red clover-blossom and of the cool shadow
of the cloud on the face of the wanderer
who suddenly thought he didn’t know
how to write about it all in Latin… And now,
seven hundred years later, all I remember
are these lines:
Qualis in aestivo sudo
nova, mira pulchritudo
subito in omnibus
rebus, avibus, insectis;
novis, laetis et perfectis
patet mundus sensibus.
*
Only at dusk do eyes really begin to see.
The colours of flowers become lucid and bright
before night extinguishes them: carnations, yellow roses,
meadow-vetch and buttercups.
The wind has died down and the sky
– the faded, nearly invisible
background of all our comings and goings –
is suddenly here, just above the treetops and pylons,
shining through foliage and above the roof of the house
in all its depth and blueness. Behind the outhouse
Venus appears; to the right of the pole of the well, Jupiter:
once two gods, now two stars.
*
A last cloud moves across the sky from west to east.
A last bee alights on the flight board of the hive.
A last bird flies over the garden into the spruce hedge.
I see only its hurrying silhouette
against the background of the sky, and a swaying branch
there where it vanished. Has it a nest there?
The voice of the corncrake comes nearer and nearer.
Now it’s just behind the fence. Another crake
answers it from the roadside field. Maybe
they will meet one another tonight. Maybe tomorrow night.
*
The rain stops and, for an instant, the sun emerges from clouds.
The shadow of the pen appears on the white paper.
A redwing is singing somewhere. The wind rises
and raindrops roll off the leaves of the honeysuckle.
They say I haven’t written as suggestively as in my youth,
in the book Of dust and colours. The sun
casts a yellowish light on the quivering green world
and vanishes once again behind a cloud. I remember
that I must make a roof for the empty beehive
where the wasps nested. In the autumn I must trim down
some apple tree branches growing in front of the loft door
that are a nuisance when we want to put hay in the loft. Also
I should wash some used preserve cans:
they’re good for nails or to mix paint.
When I tried for the first time seriously to write a poem,
it was in Russian. It begins like this:
Nad…i mrachnym Baikalom
odinokaya chayka letit…
Isn’t it suggestive?
There is a time for everything. At the gate
the water ash, Ptelea trifoliata, is in bloom
and the rye stalks are already rustling dry.
*
There are so many insects this summer.
As soon as you go into the garden
a buzzing swarm of flies besieges you.
The bumblebees are nesting in boxes you made for birds,
the wasps have made their nests in hazel bushes.
And sitting at your desk in the attic room
you constantly hear a buzzing, and don’t know
whether it’s the sound of bumblebees, wasps,
electric wires,
a plane in the skies, a car on the road,
or the voice of life itself wanting to tell you something
from the inside, from your inner self.
*
There are as many worlds as grains of sand on a beach.
Big and small, round and square,
light and dark, age-old and transient:
some stand still, some go round,
some are alone, some in swarms;
and in every one of these big and small,
round and square, light and dark,
age-old and transient worlds there are seas and beaches,
and plenty of sand on those beaches;
and in each grain of sand there are as many worlds
as grains of sand on a beach, big and small,
round and square. In some of them
Buddha is already born, on some of them
he’s not yet born, in some of them
he is living and teaching just now.
In one of them I’m sitting at my desk in the attic room
and a wood warbler, Phylloscopus sibilatrix,
flies up to my window, so I can see close up
the yellow stripe above its dark eye
and how it knocks with its beak
on the window-pane and then flies away.
*
It makes little sense to talk about the subconscious,
maybe even about consciousness itself:
there are no borders, no ground, there’s nothing
to stand on. I have a mind and a face,
but the mind and face have no me.
Everything reaches everything: it’s at once
both conscious, subconscious and unconscious
and everything else. But what, then,
is all that stuff with so many names: anger, pain,
anxiety, sadness? Even being angry, being in pain:
I can’t believe they really exist.
What could we compare them to in this floating world?
With the wind coming and going, with waves;
with cracks, an invisible line without breath
running though this beautiful midsummer evening.
If everything is in everything then maybe
in this everything are even the things
that separate everything from everything:
cracks, lines, borders…barbed wire
on which every spring a whinchat sings
and where tufts of goats’ or lambs’ wool flutter in the breeze.
*
There is no God,
there is no director,
there is no conductor.
The world makes itself happen,
the play plays itself,
the orchestra plays itself.
And if the violin drops from somebody’s hand
and their heart stops beating
the man and his death never meet:
there’s nothing behind the glass;
the other side is nothing, is just a mirror
where my own fear regards me
with big eyes.
And behind this fear,
if only you look carefully enough,
there are grass and sunflowers
turning slowly by themselves towards the sun
without a God, a director, a conductor.
*
The world doesn’t consist of matter or spirit,
of fields, particles or dynamic geometry.
The world consists of questions and answers,
the world is wen-do or kong-an
(in Japanese mondo and koan). Today at noon
a relative of mine drove up in his jeep
and told me that next Thursday I have to go to a funeral:
V.’s twelve-year-old son fell
from the stable-loft onto a concrete floor
and died two days later without regaining consciousness.
I know this too is a question.
I know there’s an answer here. I know
I should know the answer but…
*
Late summer: a faded old watercolour
more and more lacking in colour and depth.
As every autumn, big clumsy flies
creep through cracks into rooms
and can’t find the way out. In the evening clouds gather
in the sky but there’s not even a dew at night. Jays
pick the last peas from the bed.
Flocks of thrushes light on rowan trees.
We’ve seen it so many times already. The long drought
has left its imprint on our faces and thoughts.
And it’s hard to believe there’s anything new
under the sun, except the wind and some delusory clouds,
meteor-flashes in the night sky and other
accidental things that you for some reason
take notice of and keep in mind, like the earwig
that turned around and around on the gravel path
beside our house.
*
The full moon south-east above Piigaste forest.
A ripe apple falling with a thump
from the crab-apple tree behind the privy.
Two round things calling to my mind
Chinese poetry and the round teaching
of hua-yen philosophy: every single thing
contains all other things,
as I have several times thought and said,
and cannot but think and say once again,
tonight, some nights before the autumn equinox.
*
I told the students about the beginning of Greek culture.
Telling them the Hittite story of Ullikummi I said
that among known Lydian inscriptions there are some
poetic texts, but they can hardly be read. I also talked about Homer
and his gods, about the tomb of Zeus on Crete
and the religion of Mithra which proclaims
that the world is a battleground of two mighty adversaries –
the forces of Good and Evil, Truth and Lie, Dark and Light –
and the faithful are Mithra’s soldiers, the soldiers of Light
in this age-old war where stone stands against stone,
tree against tree, animal against animal, man against man.
Then I finished and took the bus home.
I was tired and had a terrible thirst.
*
From stalks and curls of pine-bark
the flycatcher builds its nest.
From gravel and pebbles
the glaciers have built hills and drumlins.
From short poems
I put together my own China:
it’s so easy to walk and breathe
in your company,
Tao Yuanming, Li Bo, Meng Haoran.
*
from
SUMMERS AND SPRINGS
(1995/2004)
translated by
JAAN KAPLINSKI
with FIONA SAMPSON
In the morning I was presented to President Mitterrand,
in the evening I weeded-out nettles under the currant bushes.
A lot happened in between; the ride from Tallinn to Tartu and to our country home
through the sp
ring we had waited so long for,
and that came, as always, unexpectedly,
all at once changing serious greyish Estonia
into a primary school child’s drawing in pale green,
into a play-landscape where mayflies, mayors and cars
are all somewhat tiny and ridiculous… In the evening
I saw the full moon rise above the alder grove. Two bats
circled over the courtyard. The President’s hand
was soft and warm. As were his eyes
where fatigue was, in a curious way,
mingled with force, and depth with banality.
He had bottomless night eyes
with something mysterious in them
like the paths of moles underground
or the places where bats hibernate and sleep.
*
The radio’s talking about the Tiananmen bloodbath.
It was three years ago. Just before that
I was there too: the square was empty, the sun shining.
At night it was freezing, but the city air
was full of dust. I don’t know whether it came
from the Gobi desert or from building sites
in the city itself. At the other end of the square
huge cauldrons were boiling: a bowl of rice
with sauce and salad for less than a dollar.
I still remember its taste
as I remember young men whispering
in all the cities at the doors of all the hotels:
exchange money exchange money exchange change.
*
The sea doesn’t want to make waves.
The wind doesn’t want to blow.
Everything wants balance, peace
and seeking peace has no peace.
If you understand this, does it
change something? Can you be peaceful
even where there is no peace?
Is it a different kind of peace?
Questions all over again. Answers
Selected Poems Page 9
