So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three hundred times life-size bee-swarm of steel.
But none of this is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us company part of the way.
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers—trustingly—follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the darkness.
5
We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor, two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, “This music is so heroic,” and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly despise themselves for not being murderers,
don’t recognize themselves here,
and the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transformations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged and strong, snail track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us—now—
up
the depths.
• III •
The Gallery
I stayed overnight at a motel by the E3.
In my room a smell I’d felt before
in the Asiatic halls of a museum:
masks Tibetan Japanese on a pale wall.
But it’s not masks now, it’s faces
forcing through the white wall of oblivion
to breathe, to ask about something.
I lie awake watching them struggle
and disappear and return.
Some lend each other features, exchange faces
far inside me
where oblivion and memory wheel and deal.
They force through oblivion’s second coat
the white wall
they fade out fade in.
Here is a sorrow that doesn’t call itself sorrow.
Welcome to the authentic galleries!
Welcome to the authentic galleys!
The authentic grilles!
The karate boy who paralyzed someone
is still dreaming of fast money.
This woman keeps buying things
to toss in the hungry mouth of the vacuum
sneaking up behind her.
Mr. X doesn’t dare go out.
A dark stockade of ambiguous people
stands between him
and the steadily retreating horizon.
She who once fled from Karelia
she who could laugh . . .
now shows herself
but dumb, petrified, a statue from Sumer.
As when I was ten and came home late.
In the stairwell the light switched off
but the lift I stood in was bright, it rose
like a diving-bell through black depths
floor by floor while imagined faces
pressed against the grille . . .
But the faces are not imagined now, they are real.
I lie straight out like a cross street.
Many step out from the white mist.
We touched each other once—we did!
A long bright carbolic-scented corridor.
The wheelchair. The teenage girl
learning to talk after the car crash.
He who tried to call out underwater
and the world’s cold mass poured in
through nose and mouth.
Voices in the microphone said: Speed is power,
speed is power!
Play the game, the show must go on!
We move through our career stiffly, step by step,
as if in a Noh drama—
masks, high-pitched song: It’s me, it’s me!
The one who’s failed
is represented by a rolled-up blanket.
An artist said: Before, I was a planet
with its own dense atmosphere.
Entering rays were broken into rainbows.
Perpetual raging thunderstorms, within.
Now I’m extinct and dry and open.
I no longer have childlike energy.
I have a hot side and a cold side.
No rainbows.
I stayed overnight in the echoing house.
Many want to come in through the walls
but most of them can’t make it:
they’re overcome by the white hiss of oblivion.
Anonymous singing drowns in the walls.
Discreet tappings that don’t want to be heard
drawn-out sighs
my old repartees creeping homelessly.
Listen to society’s mechanical self-reproaches
the voice of the big fan
like the artificial wind in mine tunnels
six hundred meters down.
Our eyes keep wide open under the bandages.
If I could at least make them realize
that this trembling beneath us
means we are on a bridge.
Often I have to stand motionless.
I am the knife thrower’s partner at a circus!
Questions I tossed aside in rage
come whining back
don’t hit me, but nail down my shape
my rough outline
and stay in place when I’ve walked away.
Often I have to be silent. Voluntarily!
Because “the last word” is said again and again.
Because good-day and good-bye . . .
Because this very day . . .
Because the margins rise at last
over their brims
and flood the text.
I stayed overnight at the sleepwalker’s motel.
Many faces here are desperate
others smoothed out
after the pilgrim’s walk through oblivion.
They breathe vanish struggle back again.
They look past me.
They all want to reach the icon of justice.
It happens rarely
that one of us really sees the other:
a person shows himself for an instant
as in a photograph but clearer
and in the background
something that is bigger than his shadow.
He’s standing full-length before a mountain.
It’s more a snail’s shell than a mountain.
It’s more a house than a snail’s shell.
It’s not a house but has many rooms.
It’s indistinct but overwhelming.
He grows out of it, it out of him.
It’s his life, it’s his labyrinth.
• IV •
Below Zero
We are at a party that doesn’t love us. At last the party lets its mask drop and shows itself for what it really is: a marshalling yard. Cold colossi stand on rails in the mist. Chalk scribbled on the wagon doors.
It shouldn’t be said but there is much suppressed violence here. That’s why the components are so heavy. And why it’s so hard to see something else, too: a little reflection from a mirror, flitting on the house-walls and gliding through the unknowing forest of glimmering faces, a biblical text that was never written: “Come unto me, for I am full of contradictions, like you.”
Tomorrow I am working in another town. I swish toward it through the morning hour,
which is like a big dark-blue cylinder. Orion hangs above the ground-frost. Children are standing in a silent cluster waiting for the school bus, children no one prays for. The light is growing as slowly as our hair.
The Boat—The Village
A Portuguese fishing boat, blue, the wash rolls up the Atlantic a little.
A blue speck far out, but still I’m there, the six aboard don’t notice we’re seven.
I saw such a boat being built, it lay like a big lute without strings
in Poor Valley, the village where they wash and wash in fury, patience, melancholy.
The shore black with people, some meeting breaking up, the loudspeakers being carried away.
Soldiers led the speaker’s Mercedes through the crush, words drummed on its metal sides.
The Black Mountains
At the next bend the bus broke free of the mountain’s cold shadow,
turned its nose to the sun, and crept roaring upward.
We were packed in. The dictator’s bust was
wrapped in newspaper. A bottle passed from mouth to mouth.
Death, the birthmark, was growing on all of us, quicker on some, slower on others.
Up in the mountains the blue sea caught up with the sky.
Homeward
A telephone call ran out in the night and glittered over the countryside and in the suburbs.
Afterward I slept uneasily in the hotel bed.
I was like the needle in a compass carried through the forest by an orienteer with a thumping heart.
After a Long Drought
The summer evening is grey.
The rain steals down from the sky
and lands quietly as if
it had to overpower someone sleeping.
The water rings jostle on the bay’s surface
and that is the only surface there is—
the other is height and depth
soar and sink.
Two pine stems
shoot up and end in long hollow signal drums.
Gone are the cities and the sun.
The thunder’s in the tall grass.
It’s possible to ring up the mirage island.
It’s possible to hear the grey voice.
Iron ore is honey for the thunder.
It’s possible to live with one’s code.
A Place in the Forest
On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up—that was all. You go alone. A tall building that consists entirely of cracks, a building that is perpetually tottering but can never collapse. The thousandfold sun floats in through the cracks. In this play of light an inverted law of gravity prevails: the house is anchored in the sky and whatever falls, falls upward. There you can turn around. There you are allowed to grieve. You can dare to face certain old truths otherwise kept packed, in storage. The roles I have, deep down, float up, hang like the dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some out-of-the-way Melanesian islet. A childlike aura circles the gruesome trophies. So mild it is, in the forest.
Funchal
The fish restaurant on the beach, simple, a shack built by shipwrecked people. Many turn away at the door, but not the gusts from the sea. A shadow stands in his reeking cabin frying two fish according to an old recipe from Atlantis—small explosion of garlic, oil spills over the tomato slices. Every bite says that the ocean wishes us well, a humming from the deep.
She and I look into each other. Like climbing up the wild blossoming hillsides without feeling the least tiredness. We’re on the side of the animals, we’re welcome, we don’t get older. But over the years we’ve experienced so much together. We remember that, and also times when we were good for nothing (as when we lined up to give blood to the flourishing giant—he had ordered transfusions), things that would’ve separated us if they hadn’t brought us closer, and things we forgot together—but they have not forgotten us. They’ve become stones, dark ones and light ones. Stones in a scattered mosaic. And now it happens: the bits fly together, the mosaic is visible. It’s waiting for us. It’s shining from the wall in our hotel room, a design both violent and tender, perhaps a face, we haven’t time to notice everything as we pull off our clothes. . . .
At dusk we go out. The cape’s enormous dark blue paw lies sprawled in the sea. We step into the human whirlpool, pushed around in a friendly way, soft controls, everyone chattering in that foreign language. “No man is an island.” We become stronger through them, and through ourselves. Through that within us which the other can’t see. Which can meet only itself. The innermost paradox, the garage flower, the ventilator to the good darkness. A drink that bubbles in empty glasses. A loudspeaker that sends out silence. A pathway that overgrows again behind each step. A book that can be read only in the dark.
THE WILD MARKET SQUARE
DET VILDA TORGET
1983
• I •
Brief Pause in the Organ Recital
The organ stops playing and the church becomes deathly quiet, but only for a couple of seconds.
And the faint rumbling penetrates from the traffic outside, that greater organ.
For we are surrounded by the murmuring of the traffic, it flows along the cathedral walls.
The outer world glides like a transparent film and with shadows struggling pianissimo.
And as if it were part of the street noise I hear my pulse beating in the silence,
I hear my blood circulating, the cascade that hides inside me, that I walk around with,
and as close as my blood and as far away as a memory from when I was four
I hear the truck that rumbles past and makes the six-hundred-year-old walls tremble.
This could hardly be less like a mother’s lap, yet at the moment I am a child,
hearing the grown-ups talking far away, the voices of the winners and the losers mingling.
On the blue benches a sparse congregation. And the pillars rise like strange trees:
no roots (only the common floor) and no crown (only the common roof).
I relive a dream. That I’m standing alone in a churchyard. Everywhere heather glows
as far as the eye can reach. Who am I waiting for? A friend. Why doesn’t he come. He’s here already.
Slowly death turns up the lights from underneath, from the ground. The heath shines, a stronger and stronger purple—
no, a color no one has seen . . . until the morning’s pale light whines in through the eyelids
and I wake to that unshakable PERHAPS that carries me through the wavering world.
And each abstract picture of the world is as impossible as the blueprint of a storm.
At home stood the all-knowing Encyclopedia, a yard of bookshelf, in it I learned to read.
But each one of us has his own encyclopedia written, it grows out of each soul,
it’s written from birth on, the hundreds of thousands of pages stand pressed against each other
and yet with air between them! Like the quivering leaves in a forest. The book of contradictions.
What’s in it changes by the hour, the pictures retouch themselves, the words flicker.
A wake washes through the whole text, followed by the next wave, and then the next . . .
From March 1979
Weary of all who come with words, words but no language
I make my way to the snow-covered island.
The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!
I come upon the tracks of deer in the snow.
Language but no words.
Memories Look at Me
A June morning, too soon to wake,
too late to fall asleep again.
I must go out—the greenery is dense
with memories, they follow me with their gaze.
They can’t be seen, they merge completely into
the background, true chameleons.
They are so close that I can hear them breathe
though the birdsong is deafening.<
br />
Winter’s Gaze
I lean like a ladder and with my face
reach in to the second floor of the cherry tree.
I’m inside the bell of colors, it chimes with sunlight.
I polish off the swarthy red berries faster than four magpies.
A sudden chill, from a great distance, meets me.
The moment blackens
and remains like an axe-cut in a tree trunk.
From now on it’s late. We make off half running
out of sight, down, down into the ancient sewage system.
The tunnels. We wander around for months
half in service and half in flight.
Brief devotions when some hatchway opens above us
and a weak light falls.
We look up: the starry sky through the grating.
The Station
A train has just rolled in. Coach after coach stand still,
but no doors open, no one gets off or on.
Are there no doors at all? Inside, a crowd
of shut-in figures stirring to and fro.
Gazing out through immovable windowpanes.
Outside, a man who walks along the coaches with a hammer.
He strikes the wheels, a feeble clang. Except for here!
Here the chime swells unbelievably: a lightning stroke,
peal of cathedral bells, a sailing-around-the-world peal
that lifts the whole train and the landscape’s wet stones.
Everything is singing. This you will remember. Travel on!
• II •
Answers to Letters
In the bottom drawer of my desk I found a letter that first arrived twenty-six years ago. A letter in panic, and it’s still breathing when it arrives the second time.
A house has five windows: through four of them the day shines clear and still. The fifth faces a black sky, thunder and storm. I stand at the fifth window. The letter.
Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Page 10