are few, as always.
The wave goes up and down.
A flock of birds flies low to NNE.
This, too, is a wave. Thought is waves, too.
*
God has left us: I felt this clearly
loosening the earth around a rhubarb plant.
It was black and moist. I don’t know where he is,
only a shelf full of sacred books remains of him,
a couple of wax candles, a prayer wheel and a little bell.
Coming back to the house I thought
there might still be something: the smell of lilac and honeysuckle.
Then suddenly I imagined a child’s face
there, on the other side, in eternity
looking here, into time, regarding wide-eyed
our comings, goings and doings in this time-aquarium
under the light of the sun going down;
and falling asleep under a water-lily leaf
somewhere far away in the west.
*
The possibility of rain… If rain is possible
everything is possible: spinach, lettuce, radish and dill,
even carrots and potatoes, even black
and red currants, even swallows
above the pond where you can see
the reflection of the full moon, and bats flying.
The children finish playing badminton and go in.
There’s a haze to the west. Little by little
the fatigue in my limbs changes to optimism. I dream
I borrow a plane to fly to Cologne.
I must go in too. The sky’s nearly dark,
a half-moon shining through birch branches.
Suddenly I feel myself like an alchemist’s retort
where all this – heat, boredom,
hope and new thoughts –
is melting into something strange, colourful and new.
*
A fit body doesn’t exist. There are only space,
extension, endless possibilities,
the fact that you can touch that birch tree there,
fetch the big white stone from the ditch.
The sick body is everywhere: the room, courtyard,
path to the well, the house and the pale-blue sky
are all full of it. The sick body
is so big that everything touches,
hurts and injures it. A spruce branch swaying
at the fence comes in and bruises your face.
The wind swinging the witches’ broom
blows through your breast.
The swallows’ cries hit you like hammer blows.
Night falls like an old wet blanket on your eyes and mouth.
*
The age-old dream of mankind: to fly like a bird. A fairy tale come true not as a fairy tale but as a machine, an airline company that puts in motion lots of other machines: wheels, axes, levers and drives that sell you a ticket, ask SMOKING – NON-SMOKING, put you in a pigeonhole – BUSINESS CLASS, TOURIST CLASS, EUROCLASS, ECONOMY CLASS – and pack you into a huge cigar box in A, B, D, E or F, give you dinner, offer you cigarettes, earrings, watches, perfume and sweets. In business class drinks are free, elsewhere only the smiles and the air are free, but during the flight the air becomes denser and denser and you feel more and more of an urge to jump out, to break out of this cigar box, in order to really fly or at least fall into these white shining clouds, through which you can’t see whether there is sea or land under you and on whose far edge another plane is creeping toward Frankfurt like a cockroach on a white wool blanket.
*
One day you will do everything for the last time: breathe, make love, drink, sleep and wake up. Maybe even think. One day you will visit Paris for the last time. If you knew when, you’d go somewhere you felt suited you. No, not to the Louvre, not to the Pantheon, not to a street café, not to a library, but to the botanical gardens, to the Jardin des Plantes where you have a chance to encounter the dandelion, wood sorrel and mallow who will acknowledge you. As you will be acknowledged by the silence that took you by the hand, helping you to overcome fear in your home on University Street in Tartu late one afternoon when everyone else was away. You were sitting on the sofa with a book in your hand. Darkness was falling. Distant voices changed their tone and the shadows crept out from under the wardrobes and beds. It’s the same silence that was waiting for you in an old outhouse full of old wooden vessels and dust that nobody had cleaned up for years. The silence that took hold of you like a voiceless dark vortex dragging you into depths whose bottom you haven’t yet reached. If there is any bottom at all: maybe there is only the echo, a rumble that has come nearer with every year, the deafening, dizzying TE DEUM or OM MANI PADME HUM of free fall, of freedom.
*
Evening’s coming. The land and the forest meet
the big cool silence that is disturbed
only by the buzz of gnats and the warning cry of a nightingale
from the bushes near our sauna. I come back from the garden
through chill alternating with warmth: it reminds me
of summers in childhood when I cycled
through similar waves of cold and warmth,
through the smell of pine trees and strawberries. Childhood.
No, I’d never like to get it back.
There was a shadow lying on my childhood. I have always
fled this shadow, am fleeing it even now,
although I feel that when I’m finally out of its reach
there will be only a void, a cool voiceless void
with pine bark peelings, feathers and ourselves
caught in a dizzying vortex, a free fall
from night to morning, from morning to night.
*
It’s raining again, and Estonia is cooling like a sauna, like a fireplace. The rain is cold. Big drops fall from the balcony onto the window box that stayed empty this summer. Grandmother was too weak to grow flowers in the box as she had done every year, and she complained more and more. This summer she spent a couple of weeks in the countryside at her cousin’s, she even wrote us a letter from there, but then we got a message that she had fallen very ill. She was taken to the hospital in town, and they found she had a large intestinal cancer. She never recovered from surgery but lived some days in a high fever, in a mental twilight, speaking in a loud voice to her dead relatives as if they’d come to take her. Maybe they really had, maybe she saw something we couldn’t see. But we could never ask her about that.
*
The centre of the world is here, in Manchester.
I carry it with me
as we all do. The centre of the world
pierces me, the way a pin
pierces the body of an insect.
The centre of the world
is the pain.
*
My poems often aren’t poems; they’re parts of a long declaration of love to the world, a long poetic list of people and things I love. When I was young I was fond of my thoughts, my feelings, my longing and joy. I approached the world like a hot air balloon which covered everything up. With the years the balloon has cooled down, shrunk, and I see more and more of other things, I see simply what is. This simply what is has always seemed odd to me. Sometimes I experience this oddity as elevated, sometimes it’s simply funny. The feeling of oddity has never disappeared. It’s probably deeper and more self-conscious than ever.
The wall clock was made in Valga in 1902, and it’s still going quite well. It could even strike, if I had a chain for the other weight. But I don’t believe I could get accustomed to a wall clock that struck hours. Now it’s showing 11. It’s December 31st, 1992. As often before, I am writing something in the last hour of the year. I’m not sure I would like to call it a poem. It’s not taking much time, and the emotional atmosphere of the last hour of the year suits writing well. The tick-tock of the old clock suits this atmosphere well too. I think that maybe the dead clockmaker from Valga is se
nding his greetings to me and my family this way. I can’t do the same to him.
*
Less and less space for flying. I don’t know whether my wings have grown longer or the walls and ceiling of this room have shrunk, so that my left wing nearly touches the wall to my left and my right wing the wall to my right. When I rise a little my head touches the ceiling and my hair get chalky. It’s good that I have grey hair, otherwise a glance at my head would show how little space I have left. At the moment you can probably only see it from my eyes, but it’s not our custom to look into the eyes of other people, especially on New Year’s Eve when all the cats and all eyes are grey in the same way.
*
More and more empty words, the tricolour under grey clouds, music, new ways of saying and doing things. You bow, smile, thank, ask questions, vote. But deep inside you a little child’s voice is shouting louder and louder: ‘How did I get here?’
Is this your home or a place of punishment, an alien bleak piece of land set against an alien bleak sea, an alien language and alien people to whom you must return again and again from dreams where you could be on these islands or in China, in Greece, in the West Coast cedar forests? We bow, we smile, we thank, we ask questions. The phone rings, you’re caught by the phone line like a fish by a hook. Was it you somebody wanted to catch or are you just bait for somebody bigger and more important who lives here, on this bleak land in this bleak sea, and who is lured out of the depths by your story, your poem or simply by your despair?
*
I saw something white far away at the roadside. At first I took it for a bike, then I realised that it was just a bunch of white umbelliferae. All morning I’d tried to read a poem by Ruan Ji, but with little success. There were too many words there meaning sadness, sorrow, pain and trouble. It seems there are dozens of such words in Chinese: this certainly means that the Chinese had a sophisticated culture of mourning and grieving. Early in the day the sun was shining, then grey clouds began rising from the north and it got chilly, with drizzle from time to time. I felt nearly as sad as the Chinese poet who lived 1,700 years ago. But I know from my own experience that a certain kind of sadness is connected with the birth or rebirth of your poetic gift. It’s painful: poems aren’t born easily, they always break something in you, rip you apart, take away a piece of your flesh, leaving a scar like those you got falling off your bike on a stony road or cutting your finger with a knife.
*
The weather changed overnight. The clouds that were like grey wolves changed into white sheep, creeping innocently up from behind the spruce hedge that leads to the neighbour’s oat field. The granary roof which had turned nearly black with rain dried out and became light grey again. I wanted to do nothing but simply to be and to walk around in the midst of this summer which had finally arrived. We always feel it’s too short, we have too little of it. Everything is suddenly clearer, is open, turned outwards, towards others, towards the clouds, towards light. I stood on the jetty, closed my eyes and listened to the voices of summer: the forest was murmuring, aspen leaves were rustling, and a late finch was singing in the alder grove. A school of tiny carp swam in the pond and a frog was quacking on the bank. I thought that I would like to be like these frogs: I would lie half the day in water and croak now and then. But one thought wouldn’t let me go. A summer thought, a summer poem, was striving, was climbing higher and higher, believing that it would soon reach a surface, a wall. A thought that summer is like a huge glass bell around us and above us, catching all our voices and giving them a clearer sound.
Summer is a piece of our phylogenetic childhood that we carry with us as a deep dim memory. We don’t go back to Africa where we come from, as swallows and storks do. But once a year Africa comes here, meets us here. Summer comes to us like a great psychoanalyst, a phylogenetic Freud. It’s like a great wizard, it makes wonderful things: teaches fledglings to fly, transforms newts into real frogs and the meadow into a huge flowerbed. On some still, worm mornings it can even transform us into something more human. I dare not say whether it means we become more ourselves. But on a mild summer evening it means a great deal.
*
My eyesight’s weakening. I don’t see the plants in the lawn beneath my feet as sharply as before. And I always have the feeling that I haven’t seen them enough. I would like to look, to see them with more reality, more in-depth; to look this patch of lawn, these knotgrasses, this clover, these Alchemillas, these Plantagos, these dandelions into myself. Or to look myself into them, to be for a while a stem of grass, a winding stem of vetch, a white clover blossom bending under the weight of a black bumblebee. I think I am simply afraid. I’m afraid that I still don’t see all this with enough reality, so that I could take a patch of the lawn with me into the time when my eyes will see no more. In fact, I would like to take something of all this Over There, to the other side. I am afraid that, once there, I will have little left other than words: sentences and thoughts but no leaves of grass, no patch of lawn with dead oak leaves from last summer, no bumble bee in flight and no chirping of grasshoppers announcing midsummer.
I have gone through this world like a tourist through a museum. I’ve tried to glean something from these thousands of displays, to keep something essential in mind. But after visiting time is over, when the warden says that the museum is closing, there will be hopelessly little that I can remember. And lying there in an empty hotel room I’ll think that during my whole life I have been unhappily in love with this wonderful world we have to hurry through. It’s because of this unhappy love I want to get something of my own, to buy something really belonging to myself, as a man unable to win the love of a woman tries to turn her into his possession. But he too will finally have only an empty room and a memory where the words, sentences and thoughts have eaten up, forced out all the clover blossoms, Althaea leaves and the chirping of the first grasshoppers, where his eyes cannot recall the flowering of white clover or that curve of female hips he hoped was a gateway to another, more real world.
*
The world is a single event.
Events have no beginning and no end.
The wind moves the oak leaves,
the oak leaves move in the wind.
In fact there’s no border
between the oak leaves and the wind,
no difference between the wind and the leaves and twigs
it moves, between the wind and this windy day
where the weather’s changing, and for an instant
you understand the oneness of the leaves and the wind,
and a little green beetle
tumbles from the oak into your hair.
*
I opened the Russian-Chinese dictionary:
there between two pages was a tiny insect.
It spread its wings and flew away.
I lost sight of it, maybe
it’s still struggling on the window pane
or has died there like so many insects or succeeded
in getting out into the open. Like some of us.
For a while I wondered if it couldn’t have been
a word, a sign from the dictionary
which had had enough and wanted to become
something else, something more than a sign,
a hieroglyph under the cold glass covers
of this world, of this life.
*
I’ve thought that I thought about death, but in fact I don’t know how one should think of death. Death is probably very hard, as hard as life, but life is something you live piece by piece, whereas you die once and for all… Once and for all you have to tear away all the lived life – seven, seventeen, seventy, and if someone is very strong, eighty years – and to let them fall into an abyss, into the void. A tiny pale bodiless soulless somebody lingers for moment on the rim of the abyss. This is the one who has thrown away his life; it would be better to say he has let it loose. Seen from the other side life is death, life and death are one and the same thing. Lif
e is something you must keep and guard all the time like a rat in a cage. Because it is so hard to think of death, I prefer to think of the currants: black, red and white currants which are so ripe that they fall when you touch the bush.
*
I don’t have a land or a sky of my own.
I only have a little white cloud
which I met once, as a schoolboy
lying in the courtyard on a pile of twigs
looking into the sky. There were martins
and clouds: this one, my only one, too.
I would recognise it today too,
through all the transformations,
if only I had time just to lie there
idly on a pile of twigs in the courtyard.
*
THE SOUL RETURNING
(1973-75)
translated by
JAAN KAPLINSKI
with FIONA SAMPSON
The Soul Returning
Never
wanted
that
never
wanted
to be
I
me
everything
by
chance
poem
called
a poem
pain
called
something
else
Selected Poems Page 10
