by Dorthe Nors
Minna’s legs rail against the sky.
Minna’s head plunges toward stone.
Minna lands badly on her skull.
The skull breaks the fall of an entire woman.
Minna slides down into the water.
Minna slides down through the seaweed.
Minna sinks like a stone.
Minna’s arms plow the water.
Minna’s eyes are open and alive.
Minna’s mouth is moist and round.
The sea feels like sweet chill.
The Baltic is a bowl.
The Baltic’s a submarine valley.
Beauty won’t deny itself.
The fish scoot off in gleaming procession.
The fish turn and pivot for Minna.
The scales glitter.
The eyes shine silver.
Minna reverts downward.
Minna wriggles her arms.
Minna waves to the darkness.
The darkness waves back.
Minna sees a gestalt in the darkness.
The gestalt has a beard.
The gestalt’s mouth is a soft wet brushstroke.
Chest hair forces its way upward.
The beard wanders downward away from its chin.
An Adam’s apple lies in the middle of the hair.
Dad? Minna thinks.
Dad waves.
Dad takes hold of Minna.
The fauna closes around them.
Bubbles seep from nose and mouth.
Hair flutters like sea grass.
Minna’s pelvis has never been so round.
Minna’s legs fuse and articulate.
Dad smiles at Minna.
Dad swims around Minna.
Minna says, Helgenæs?
Minna gets water in her mouth.
Minna gets a lot of water in her mouth.
Minna’s lungs squeeze.
The lungs stretch.
The lungs are hard as cement.
The lungs don’t want anything but to go upward.
Minna could happily continue downward, but
Minna’s lungs want to go up.
Minna’s bruised skull like a cork.
Minna’s skull directional.
Minna’s arms wretched fins.
Minna’s legs kick and thrash.
The legs strike bedrock.
Minna’s hands strike granite.
The rocks close around Minna.
Minna grasps the seaweed strands.
Minna grabs hold of Bornholm from below.
Minna throws up her arms in late-summerness.
Minna scrabbles on stone.
Minna searches for a chink.
Minna contracts like a muscle before it explodes.
Minna clings to dry land, angry and insecure.
Minna’s tongue feels cold as bronze.
The sun acting up.
The corneas drying out.
Minna hauls herself farther up, and then she lies there.
Minna has rock-bathed.
Minna’s been down and out.
Minna’s toes plash in the surface of the ocean.
The rest of Minna has been decently salvaged.
Minna’s world stands still.
Minna thinks of Dad in the water.
Minna thinks of her head.
Minna’s head was apparently injured a bit.
The head hurting.
The mouth spitting.
Snot running.
The sun and the gulls having a look-see.
Minna lies with eyes shut.
Minna lies and listens.
Something rustles.
Minna raises her eyes, and there stand a pair of rubber shoes.
The shoes sit on a pair of feet.
The shoes shuffle uncertainly.
Hair pokes well out from the ankles.
A man has come to Minna’s rescue.
Minna can’t be bothered.
Minna’s not going to be rescued now.
Minna’s rescued herself.
Minna props herself up on an elbow: Yes?
The man asks, Are you okay?
Minna says, I’ve been in the water.
The man hunkers down: On purpose?
Minna says, Not completely.
The man wants to know if he should call for an ambulance.
Minna places her hands on the rock.
Minna raises herself a bit to sit.
Minna can see the man better now.
The man’s plump.
The man has a beard.
Medium height.
The face attractive, and the mouth now opening.
The man says he could hear someone singing.
The man says he crawled out to have a look.
The man’s got a banjo on his back.
Minna points at the banjo.
The man looks at the banjo as if it weren’t his.
The banjo’s his.
The banjo and he were on their way to Årsdale.
The man plays banjo during the tourist season.
Guitar’s more for the mainland.
The man introduces himself.
The man says his name’s Tim.
Tim seats himself at Minna’s side.
Tim sets the banjo up against Minna’s backpack.
Tim takes hold of Minna’s hand.
Minna’s hand is wet and cold.
Tim squeezes the hand a little.
The ambulance isn’t out of the picture.
The medicopter isn’t either.
Tim raises his index finger.
Tim says Minna should follow it with her eyes.
Tim’s finger oscillates, but
Minna has her eye on something else.
The penny’s dropped:
Tim’s on Bornholm.
Tim’s the cousin.
Tim knows someone with a rehearsal space in Kastrup.
The rehearsal space is cheap.
Minna can’t stop looking.
Tim’s family resemblance seeps out.
Tim does look like Lars.
Tim’s beard is just more modest.
Tim also looks gentler.
Tim seems nice.
Tim’s just about sweet.
Tim is Lars, like Lars was at night.
Tim is Lars without deadlines and Linda.
Lars was a porcupine.
Lars was a pillbox.
Tim’s warm and hairy.
Tim’s soft and shy.
Tim looks at her worriedly.
Tim says that she’s bleeding from her head.
Minna says, Who isn’t?
Tim says she’s freezing, but
Minna isn’t freezing.
It was me who sang, says Minna
and then she shoots, she shoots him the mermaid eye.
Days
So much for that winter,
I thought, looking at the last crocuses of spring;
they lay down on the ground
and I was in doubt.
Chewed out an entire school because a single sentence bugged me
and drank my hot chocolate, sweet/bitter.
Worked,
considered traveling somewhere I never imagined I’d find myself
yet stayed where I was
and banged on my neighbor’s wall,
was in doubt, but sure,
was insecure,
stood still by the window,
let my gaze move from running shoes to wool socks
and lay down on the bed.
Was attacked by a cross between a Rottweiler and a Great Dane in Søndermarken, survived.
Yelled at five dog owners in down jackets, YOU’RE ALL SICK!
Survived.
Ran my route (cemetery, Frederiksberg Gardens, Søndermarken, home) faster than ever.
Propped my hands on my knees and howled at the floor,
Why this now too? Hasn’t it been enough? Hasn’t it?
I howled
an
d found I’d sustained injury from dog attack on the left side of my tongue,
but surviving, always surviving,
that’s the way I am, not the kind you can knock out,
with tongue before the mirror,
eyes open,
my face a grimace of gums and longing
and ice water for dinner.
Pondered what it meant to be happy.
Decided to test what would happen if I were happy,
really happy.
Was afraid to be disappointed.
Cleaned the fridge,
thought about what he’d written
and kept returning to the word self-confidence, wrote that down too,
wrote it down again
and went to the supermarket.
Took in the bottle of wine the neighbor had placed on my mat:
Excuse the noise, Love, Majbritt, it said; so that’s her name, I thought,
and set the bottle atop the fridge,
moved it under the sink,
I’ll drink it for Pentecost,
for Pentecost when I’m happy,
really happy.
Woke at the sound of my mirror falling down, and that cannot be good.
Salvaged the glass, but had to go down to the backyard with the frame, and that cannot be good.
Considered crawling under the blankets
or going on a bike ride
or making a change—gills, paws, antennae—
but could not.
Ascertained that when the wind’s in the east, Valby’s Siberia,
roughly just as empty
and full of loose dogs running from hedge to hedge, no doubt after dead birds.
Went for an evening walk on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard.
Heard kids practicing the flute through half-open windows
while blackbirds up on the chimneys sang to themselves
and to the dogs by the hedges
and me on the street beneath Langgade Station.
Woke an hour early,
made instant coffee,
drank it,
stood by my kitchen window the same way I stood by my kitchen window when I lived on the island of Fanø and went down to the beach every day and crushed razor shells underfoot: Why do I live here? I’d wondered
and couldn’t have known that one day I would stand in a flat in Valby and look at the crooked tulips in the backyard and wonder the same thing.
Wrote.
Went for a walk in the cemetery, where everything promises spring, and stopped, as I often do, by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave, and Kyhn would always stay the same, rendered in bronze and grown into the birch tree that gnarls above him,
one day I’m going to have to take a picture of that tree,
one day it’ll be something I can show from time past,
I resolved and pilfered a twig,
watched the news,
watched my face go past in the hallway,
watched my feet in woolen socks far below
crushing nothing.
Hard wind from the east and everything smelled of southern Sweden.
Tidied up my bulletin board,
went for a run through Søndermarken and through the cemeteries, for now it is spring, and it’s tough to be happy on schedule, and rarely does anyone get what they deserve, yet now it is spring.
Took notes that later might prove useful, and everything’s dicey, but quiet.
Thought of the people you’re allowed to like, the ones you’re not allowed to, and the ones you really do anyway but never mention a word about.
Gave my secrets a good going-over,
and I haven’t given up hope, I still believe that things can open and become soft and alive, German bunkers, Berlin walls, abandoned abattoirs, it’s only a question of time and it’s all well in the end, I thought in line at the grocer’s
and stopped then on the way home outside Blankavej #25, first floor, where someone has a Mao figure standing on the windowsill and when I walk past, I sometimes think he waves and smiles, while other times it looks as if he gives me the finger,
it depends on my belief in things, and if it were always positive, I’d be crazy, I thought,
pleading with myself to raise my head, maybe it wasn’t at all his intention to make it sound that way,
so forget it,
forget the view that day across the canal,
forget the winter-gray roofs,
the way the mitten got snagged on the banister,
the hoarfrost and the sort of things that remain,
shrug it off, forget it,
the injustice of it all,
for now it is spring.
That which was yesterday in bud, today is in bloom: the carnations on my table,
the territorial blackbird on the roof, the faint grumbling from my mouth and fridge.
To reconcile yourself, I thought,
and shrugged it off
and put on the Brahms again.
Thought about the art of loving,
about the art of loving in the right way, the art of loving casually, the art of not loving when you love, the art of loving even though you can’t, the art of ceasing to love what you cannot help loving, the art of loving even though it doesn’t pay, and waiting, the art of waiting,
and then I went down to the street and glanced to either side,
no dogs, no cars, just a couple people in the rain
and me.
Bought an ice cream cone,
walked around with it slightly raised before me,
got wet but didn’t care, for people who don’t know how I feel should stop feeling for me, and if they can’t think my thoughts to their conclusion, they should think about something else, maybe they should think about their own lives, and when they think about them, they should ask themselves if their lives make more sense
and do they? I wondered
and walked home to Brahms
and the sounds down in the street.
Awoke, walked barefoot across the floor
and ate a bit of bread,
took a scrap of paper from the desk and wrote A red elephant is still an elephant on it
and grew anxious about whether that sort of thing was good enough, felt stupid, felt wan, was myself like an elephant that lurches around and knocks things over, but an elephant among broken glass is still an elephant, just as a person who isn’t up to snuff is still a person, and the Brooklyn movie theater is still a movie theater, and the grieving heart is still a heart, and a red elephant is still an elephant.
Took the bike to Damhus Pond, and it was when I had to brake by the bird-feeding area that I thought of my taxes
and then my accountant,
and then I biked home to my receipts,
crunched the numbers,
and This is a condition, I wrote at the bottom of a heating bill,
this is a way of being,
a change in the structure of existence
like the lull of rainy Sunday mornings,
like trampled sneakers and slightly sour cartons of cream,
and birds on the ground that eat from your hand and shit in place rather than flying,
and birds ought to fly,
a bird that doesn’t fly is no longer a bird.
Said thanks but no thanks to a matinée at the opera,
sat instead in the heat as it bit by bit filtered down from the drying attic to the fifth floor,
but Western Cemetery is Denmark’s largest burial ground for the dead, so the living such as I can sunbathe without being seen by anyone but the collared doves on the small plot of land north of the willow allée, and I’m not saying where.
Took off my sandals, and my jersey,
got freckles,
got an urge to bike through South Harbor into the city and hike around the lakes, hadn’t done that since New Year’s Day, which was when he wrote,
I keep imagining how much it must’ve hurt to shoot yourself in the h
eart with such a big rocket flare.
Stood still on Queen Louise’s Bridge to write down what the old man said as he squeezed his way between a young couple: Just set it down in F major, he said, and went on toward Nørrebro,
and January feels so far away on a day like this, when the clouds form over Sortedam Dossering, and kids with bike helmets wobble along the bike paths while they call to the fathers who have stuck broomsticks in through the back of their bikes so they don’t fall,
but the soul has a long time horizon.
Biked home and made coffee in my Moka Express
and drank it, squeezed out the dishrags, picked candle wax off the table, and I’m bad at being grumpy, but I have stamina, and I’m good at remembering and at loving and forgetting
To be seen as a person amid the January dark
that is no more.
Slept as if someone shook me to see if I were awake.
Went to the pharmacy, where the woman with globular breasts took all the headache pill variants down and explained the differences, and her breasts get bigger and bigger every time I go, because she wants to tell me what camphor does to mucous membranes even though I’m buying earplugs, and I have to look at the inhaler even though I’m asking for Band-Aids, and I’m certain that these breasts the size of floating dry docks started out as ping-pong balls before behavior made them grow.
Walked home slowly,
lay on the bed
and let an hour’s sleep turn into three, entangled in the bedspread like a swaddled babe,
woke, put my socks in the drawer,
told myself the story of when I met the crown prince, again and again,
told it so many times that it got pathetic, whereupon several wounds sprung leaks.
Made pasta Bolognese
and went for a walk through a world that to rub salt in my wounds had turned itself the wrong side out and revealed all its inner beauty,
all that fertility in the air, all that weeping in wait, and I’d taken the long way just to see if the elephants in Frederiksberg Gardens had lain down for the night, and the only ones left were the wood pigeons who sat in the grass.
It might have been otherwise, I thought, and looked up at the door that now and then stood ajar to the world, sometimes merely so it could poke its fingers in my face,
and yet
other times I catch a glimpse within as of a whale rising up from the sea with its tiny good clear eye peering at me, infinitely mild and inquiring after its long journey from the bottom, Are you okay?