The eye weeps for all it lost.
Cities no longer there. What are you supposed to do.
Before long the inshore waters will turn to ice.
I keep thinking everything’s different now, firm ground beneath
my feet; another, for the last time.
It all remains here within us, the lost is like a hollow chamber, a
monument,
changeless as an echo, a grief that goes on for ever.
The only city that can endure is the city that crumbles.
The only firm ground that exists is the ground caving in.
And the loss and the grief are doubled as such,
and for all its luminous humanity it seems so very much not of
this human fabric:
a withered lilac, one evening last week when I was home in Mols.
You can look at a withered lilac and feel convinced that from that
moment on nothing more remains to be said about life and death.
Always losing something we love, something we are.
Again, we have lost what used to be, and yet are none the wiser
for the loss,
the lesson.
None the wiser, nowhere near changed.
Still just a person, grieving over everything that can be
remembered,
a person believing, a person not living in the present world.
But then—
refusal. Not wanting to be a part.
On those conditions.
Autumn, simply, the vanishing of lilacs, the smell of soil after rain.
Firm ground beneath your feet;
the only firm ground that exists is the ground caving in; the only
city that can endure is the city that crumbles.
Only it remains.
Nothing has changed, but everything is lost.
Not a single useful insight to be noddingly embraced, then worn
like a shiny medal.
But still—the fragrance of the hawthorn,
the fatigued brown violet of the now definitively withered lilacs,
field upon field.
An image, and another, and the two of us together,
wanting to share so much
before the inshore waters turn to ice, before the winter is upon us.
Between us.
The sun lays all things bare.
The fact of the wallpaper having come loose, and your skin no
longer being the same.
Too much sun.
I love you, but I’m disappointed that—
I love you, and I’m disappointed that—
And you—
And us—
Maybe we could, maybe I could, be here.
With you.
Yes, you.
The characteristic restlessness of the voice.
You.
The stairs turn towards you.
Feet on this day, with no more snow.
But no more water in the rivers either.
Cities of quiet, slender women.
I never knew before that winter took so much away.
Or rather: takes.
You say you need to live in one place.
You emphasise one with a gesture, a downward cast of the hand.
I laugh out loud, because I’ve heard it before.
You stole it from me.
That knowledge. Or assumption.
Ashes to ashes, and so on.
They’re burning off the fields.
It’s against the law, that much at least she knows.
Everything unlikely collects together, a fireplace scene in which
we gather in a knot of—
emotion.
Maybe the disappointment is hardest, the struggle to believe—
and then no longer believe.
Nothing new being gained.
Nothing old being lost. Only the self again, nullified.
Whatever you used to be, it disappears, that’s what it feels like,
everything reduced to tiny, including the feeling of there perhaps
being some meaning in all the madness.
The feeling of standing here on the corner where years ago we
met, me in raptures at your sloppy appearance of which later I
would so helplessly tire,
and later still miss doubly, to the power of two as it were, yearning
to even feel something at all.
Apart from nostalgia, or reconciliation perhaps.
No longer being affected.
SAPPHIC FRAGMENTS
every single day
if not now
then you in the light
larger than any of us.
for you. Or your sake
all that beautiful glass
cupboards and drawers. What we have
more than either here or
we know.
after the war and the winter
who
the winter garden and I think I can live with that. Or the
after the war comes
and you really believed it?
winter again
returned to them
impossible not to wait for you here. Do you think
scratching cement from between the stones
you brought and wanted me to
We divide everything into two equal piles
the flagline in the garden
help but believe me
freezing, I’ve just arrived
“dead”
The weather is fantastic, autumn is actually
and pulling down on the branches, everything in
cold light.
and then I think,
no one
about to happen. For both of us.
joy and relief the first
But what I’m saying is
no party, so
throw myself out
I don’t really know.
met. But for
Are you doing that too, walking on tiptoe
a year ago now
properly
talking and holding me tight at the same time
shovelling coal into your stove,
struggled to open the door
cold water and looking like wet
hadn’t the courage and convinced myself that you knew.
current
the shore. Scrumping apples in Bogens recently
left me in the same state as
compassionate as
otherwise
winter, if not that, then
the sun is setting, the shadows are in some way more
of the treetops
and stitch by stitch, slowly
sedateness of the trees, becoming her slowly
as in the sea. That was the point she picked up the scissors
he said with a laugh
pity and envy in equal part,
shadows and golden light.
after all the trouble he’d caused us
sprouting on the beds of drained pools
as if we’d never
Your dreams are not your own, your skin
hands that
Warm bedrooms, the feeling of not needing
After our bath we lie like
never need
if you can make it so
if you think so
remains after the snow has melted.
count on it. You being there.
if.
like a formula for it
in the darkness as planets or snails,
them.
of things.
keep the different horses in different stables
not here.
it never happened
nice
all in one basket
OF DARKNESS
The setting sun. The way the light at first seems to dip down and coil, then launch forward to gild the landscape from a standing start, commencing at the far end of the fields where the hedger
ow runs and the woods begin; gentle and yet enraged, like the seeming coldness of white-hot coals, or a seeming attention to matters of detail that is actually disappointment over some very basic states-of-affairs. The way things fit together, the way a passage of events draws something through the organism, summer autumn winter, the rhythm of the flesh, and the displacements that may also occur. The holding together of something, the hanging together by spite. A skilled carpenter whose box joints are made with such accuracy as to be quite as strong as the solid wood itself. The feeling of the sun and earth coming together in the same way as two people. The fact of not understanding. The body is the corset that keeps the thoughts in place; neglect the body and the thoughts withdraw, they seep away imperceptibly, the body undoing the ties, removing them from their metal eyelets; or the thoughts seeping away, tightening a frail drawstring in retreat, a string that eventually succumbs and breaks.
The girls stand on the riding ground with their horses. Seven girls and seven horses. The horses have been walked with slackened reins, now they lower their heads by turn, snorting muzzles in the dirt, a looseness of gait, the sounds they make. Nipping at grass. Flap, flap, muzzles flapping over tarnished teeth, the muscle of tongues, the rigid bristle of eyelashes seemingly inserted physically into the lids. They lead the horses around, stirrup irons flopped over saddles, drawn from the right, across the leather’s gleaming seat, to dangle on the left, and likewise from left to right. The sun upon the black leather, a girl untangling a knotted mane, the thickness and stiffness of the hairs. A saddle scratched by a tack-room cat sharpening claws against the leather.
We see the horses with their riders, a girl and a horse connected by the reins. The horses led around the exercise ground. We watch the weary suppleness of their movements, the way seven pairs spread out over the pale oblong landscape. To all sides: fields extending like tongues, only a long, gravelled intestine cuts through their tossing contours, connecting the oblong with the stables; the manor farm at the end of the tree-lined track, the way it stands resplendent. A horse lifts a hoof, the elegant bend of the pastern, the elbow, the joining of the animal’s various parts, the seamless movement from the joints, the stretch of the tendons, the contraction of muscle. Like planets, the horses disperse with their riders, their spreading out is the only movement in the frame, a symmetry to which one can only acquiesce. Some sounds—birdsong, farm machinery at work somewhere in the fields. A flaxen fringe swept from a moistened brow, a girth loosened three notches by a practised hand beneath the saddle flap, two girth straps at once and then the third. Quiet chatter that becomes particular by virtue of the sun’s position in the sky. The movements of the horses, the body of their flesh, the spaces between them. The sun touches the horizon and ignites the fields. Lengthened beams of clutching red, the narrowest steel impacting on the eye.
At once the light is changed. A complete and simultaneous upheaval of all things, the sun powering its rays in every direction, as if they were arms thrown up in helpless surrender, only more vigorously, more elongated; the sudden coldness of everything, the emerging darkness that clutches at the girls, clutches at the horses, the painted oil drums and the striped poles, the helmet dropped in the grass.
Next, bodies are seen propelled, a few centimetres, twenty, fifty centimetres in the air, outstretched fingers, teeth bared and revealing of darkness.
An abrupt detonation.
Yet momentary, so brief as to be silence; and seconds later a turmoil of jetsam; the bodies of the girls, their open mouths and half-closed eyes. The wrench of the horses, a diagonal motion through the air, their long heads tossing back, seven forelocks unfurled like fans, a hock that nearly touches the ground, the outstretched forelegs, a tightened rein wrapped around a wrist. And then a sudden turnaround, as if everything has reached some saturation point, the apex of the upward thrust induced by the blast. The bodies of the girls then dashed to the ground, sprays of blood, festooning from a head or a stomach, trickling from noses and mouths; time altered, knees striking the earth, feet twisted awkwardly awry, a hand dragged through the air, or fanned out on the sandy earth. In this sudden downpour of death, an opening of the heavens, the bodies of the girls fall to the ground; and the hollow sigh of all things, the landscape, the arms of the sun drawing back like fingers retracting into a hand. A meltdown of day, and of the light.
Next, seven horses are seen, walking quietly about an illuminated oblong of ground in the midst of darkness. Eight floodlights are directed towards the area, their beams long and identical. The gait of the horses seems laboured and encumbered, as if they have traversed a very long distance through inhospitable terrain, searching for water or some other release. All unbroken expanses may be places for such release, perhaps even some kind of serenity. We realise a time has passed, that there is already a resignation about the wanderings of these animals. Around the enclosure, back and forth within the enclosure. Criss-crossed paths with spaces in between. The way the planets drag with them their moons, this is how the horses drag the cold frames of their girls. Reins wrapped tight around wrists, hands a blood-drained alabaster, fingers stiff and crooked as gnarled sticks of arthritis or hearts stricken with jealousy, racked and immobile, veins and arteries raised blue.
Of the night, much remains to be said. It is a task only for someone who can withstand the light, the glaring artificial light that floods the enclosure still. The horses go about their business; there is a flexing of joints, a casting of shadows. Of darkness, much remains to be said. Of the fields too, and the darkness of fields, their night. And of the horses, the horses of the night; of them, much may still be said. Moreover: the girls, the darkness that settles upon their alabaster skin, death so finely powdering the flesh, the green-white blush of death; the pale red of the lips.
She visits him again, for the first time in a while. They talk about that. He rocks gently, backwards and forwards in the chair. He’s a good friend, she thinks to herself. He says he feels no need to fall in love again, that it is past now. After her, love is past. When he goes to the kitchen to get two oranges and some chocolate for their trip into the hills—before they realised they had no time to go to the hills, not that day—she noses around in his living room. The room is so very old. It’s the first time she’s been to see him. She passes her fingers across the spines of some books, the frame containing a photograph he took, and notices a bowl of withered fruit. Three peaches and an apple, their shrivelled skins, like dulled and sunken cheeks. She thinks it to be the saddest thing she has ever seen. Fruit, sapless and diminished, consigned to bowls of oblivion in the homes of abandoned people everywhere, broken people who yearn as yet, and who will continue to yearn in time to come, perhaps even forever—there, in such places, fruit is left, to decompose and slowly rot, though never quite to vanish. And there it remains, an organic timepiece measuring the hours from the first wrench of grief, when all things came to an end. It’s as if these people wish to be reminded that everything has broken and come to a standstill; or else that life goes on, albeit without them. And they themselves: the advanced age of the fruit becomes that of the body, its deterioration a correlate of their own organism. The grieving body and the dying fruit. The dying body’s celebration of grief. Love becoming solicitude and a diligence as to decay.
Another friend’s oranges, a Cox apple.
The mattress is on the bare floor, everything looks like it’s fallen down; books piled all over, a table-top deposited without its legs, the shelving just five more or less horizontal lines between uneven rows of books. The sloping walls of the room cast shadows; the busy blade of the scissors. It’s morning. Like the feathers of a wing, the books lean first one way then the other. Plants with their pots broken open like petals scattered on the floor, the white roots extending their pale and sleepy capillaries, soil spread about a core; like her heart, the core of her warmth and the occasional sounds that issue out into the room that encloses her body.
Her body, pumping warmth out into the room. It
must be morning. You can tell from the light—soft, the way a body can be soft, an organic, fleshy light that does not stream into the room, but barges its way in, breaking things in its path, denting the thin partition walls, pressing the duvet flat as a frightened dog that cowers on the ground; the changing nature of the seams, from plunging indentations to these looser threads that strive towards the cotton like shallow water thrusting on to shore in windy weather, a shimmer of undulation in all things. She turns her head, though strenuously in the light, as if the light occupied the room like some thick transparent gel obstructing every movement. The pillow retains the imprint of his head, the duvet cast aside, its corner turned down like the page of a book. As if to remind of something other than how far one has come, something more important that one (again) wishes to prevent oneself from forgetting, dismissing (once again) from the mind.
Of Darkness Page 5