by Dorthe Nors
pain in my lower back and the one hip,
walked slowly home
and opened all the windows, for it’s a mild evening in Copenhagen,
and tomorrow I will maintain my faith in the day after tomorrow,
and that one day it will be me who’s allowed to be there when the instruments are tuning,
for there comes a day,
and a day after that day,
that’s the way days are.
Slept late,
went for a run,
lay down in bed and was awakened by the pigeons,
went for a bike ride after dinner to Western Cemetery and sat down someplace among the dead where no one could find me, and wished the evening the best, for that couldn’t hurt.
Went home, because the mosquitoes began to bite, and made a cup of coffee,
stood there with the coffee in my hand,
stood there and my nose grew cold, it suddenly hit me,
Perhaps I spend too much time in cemeteries, I thought,
and lay down on the floor, vanished corporeally, and if I don’t exist, everything up to this point doesn’t exist either, my history, America, the stone I walk around with in my pocket, and then what he wrote last winter,
and if none of those things exist, sorrow doesn’t exist, and then tomorrow doesn’t exist either,
I thought, unable to breathe, for that which doesn’t exist cannot breathe,
for there aren’t many advantages to being that which doesn’t exist, except for being able to walk through walls and listen at doors,
and I’d heard it all now, so what is that?
Got to my feet,
placed myself over by the window,
listened to one of the neighborhood dogs and stayed with it through thick and thin,
thought, Why doesn’t anyone let it in? and could feel I was no longer a young woman,
just a woman who has lived longer than my neighbor and the dog down there and many of the dead, and a thousand years ago I would have long since been laid in my grave, I thought, but look at me now,
mournful, alive, and kicking,
and I’d like to be able to believe in tomorrow,
and I can’t do anything but;
I’m hopelessly up the creek in the situation.
Sent my regrets,
thought about life’s insistence on equilibrium: we lurch from side to side, and for every time someone’s caressed on the cheek, there’s a place in the world where someone gets boxed on the ear, for every gleam of sunlight a shower of hail, for every door opened one closed, and thus for the heat that arises one place, somewhere else a new magnet is placed on the fridge.
Scribbled down the line: From her heart sprang the periphery of everything.
Scribbled down the line: Grow up!
and tied a ribbon in my hair.
Went for a walk in the cemetery,
placed the petals from the first rugosa in my palm,
and everything’s dicey, but quiet.
Thought that the worst thing about the things that change us for life, is that every day we have to persuade ourselves not to look at them and how they attest to the insignificance with which we’re shuffled around, we’re lost and found and lost again,
these daily administrative actions,
even my pulse isn’t sacred,
my family, my writing, my best intentions,
everything’s dealt with, I thought,
and tomorrow it’s up and stand on your feet, stand and walk and bear the dead weight from place to place,
jump over the sun,
make contact with the universe
and continue on down to the laundromat.
Today I was visited by Kali.
Dropped things on the floor, wanted to split in half but couldn’t,
and I can’t bear that this is a world where those who wreak damage are praised, and then today I’m visited by Kali.
Felt the fury drawing up from the floor through my body like a soundless roar,
volcanic, huge, fragile.
Biked in to a friend’s,
and then we were sitting there when a door slammed, and I, who’d tried all morning to get myself to cry, split before the eyes of another person, but it was no relief for she didn’t know how to respond, and it’s no good splitting and not being discovered, so I screamed the whole way home on the bike with the silence that civilization demands.
Made it home soaked to the skin, five miles in squall and downpour,
went through my keepsakes,
the written proofs,
and what should I believe among all the half-truths?
Wrote on the back of an envelope lying on the counter, I’m angry, and not everything is art, whereupon I picked all the magnets off the fridge and watered the clover on the windowsill,
shoved the dishes around as I washed them, because I hated doing them, just as I hated the deli counters in upscale supermarkets and the dog owners in Søndermarken, and I wanted to move back to Jutland and live in a henhouse and use empty beer cans for target practice, just to be close to something that seemed real, and dare to assume dance position and lead myself around the floor, utterly alive, three-dimensionally present with pulse and all,
for I will exist, So find me then, before I can’t feel myself anymore, I whispered out through my teeth, and then she found me, Kali, the angriest woman in the world,
and it isn’t that I don’t believe in the good in others.
It’s that the others don’t believe in the good in me.
Thought, It’s a long way from the dream of America to this, and remained prone.
Thought about scabs and chamomile tea.
Couldn’t make myself clear on the phone.
Couldn’t stand other people, so I went out among them, and I walked past thousands but saw not one.
Reasoned, Perhaps the part of me that once was in the us can still be found between the lines,
but that isn’t enough in the long run.
Went past the elephants, who were apparently doing well and, unaffected by anything, bathed in the pool and went on with their lives, trunk-flinging and backslapping, and on the way home I fainted in the cemetery behind a box hedge.
Cold sweat and hands asleep, daisies.
Remained prone afterward and relished the feeling of lost consciousness,
remained prone when the drizzle started,
remained prone until I could tell I was cold,
and then I got up and went out and looked for the next cemetery.
Reasoned, International Women’s Day would have torn me to shreds on the spot. But then it got me at last, and how many times do you have to hit out at a woman before she learns to duck?
Bought a hot dog on Toftegård Square
and didn’t want to go home, just to keep walking with the conviction that, if you keep walking, you’ll come to a day where you’re happy once more.
Reasoned, Perhaps the part of me that once was in the US has been placed in a pantry in my mind, from where she can be retrieved again
(but that isn’t enough in the long run).
Walked home
and scribbled this down: I am plagued by the vision of a faraway spring and my ability to read between the lines. I am a witness to my own truth in a flood of false evidence.
Slept as though I were two people, and one of me awake.
Called Mom, without whom my nozzles would be shot.
Thanked Kali, whose rage had driven me a small piece of the way out of the fog, this anxiety that reality will fail you, like late-night phone calls, cops at the door, others’ perpetual worrying, and then you sit there and have to insist that you’re doing it right and will manage, but after months of this you’re weighed down with belief fatigue.
Signed for a book and bore it from the post office through the supermarket and home.
Sang the same line again and again
and realized that, just because people aren’t
walking around with drips and catheters or lying in recovery position in bedrooms full of empties, it doesn’t mean they’re intact.
Went for a run, strong in the legs, as if Kali had given me some of her primordial soup,
and it’s spring now,
and it is woman’s weakness to believe it’s because she isn’t good enough that things don’t go according to plan (and it is woman’s weakness that things should go according to plan).
Envied all of them who looked as if they were in the catbird seat, on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard for instance,
people I hadn’t heard from in years,
all of them who thought they knew better because they were doing better.
Wrote a thank-you note to Aunt Margrethe on the island of Fanø for the lovely amber necklace she’d sent
and sat there with Kali like a force in my body, for she’s screamed me a piece of the way,
I’m on course to getting smarter,
I’m not nearly as empty-handed as yesterday,
and I am standing.
Went over the coded signs and symbols.
Brushed my teeth and ate my breakfast.
Sat down with a book on a bench in the cemetery and listened to the singing gibbons from the zoo and the raucous sirens in the distance, and wounds are wounds, but not in the long run.
Picked up a dried-out dog turd,
cast it away while I yelled, To stifle things!
and spooked the retired ladies in Park Cemetery, whose dogs leave turds behind in the general offcasting of everything in life that we don’t want to bear around with us anymore
(but the soul has a long time horizon).
Scribbled down in the book’s margin, Diceyness is the worst, and then walked home to go on reading,
read all that which was written there, as one reads a paper on the lookout for one’s own obituary,
read as if the next subordinate clause might be my last, but I didn’t die,
and then discovered myself, like a quiet tremor in the hand during winter, and I cast away anxiety, for that which trembles in the hand one place is certainty in another, and diceyness is the worst.
Thought, If behavior made the globular woman at the pharmacy’s breasts grow, then what might not be growing in me right now? My mind, my grief, my heart?
Ate too many apples,
drank too much coffee,
so I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were going to solve a rebus,
or I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were two people and the other one awake,
I’ll have to go to sleep with legs entangled in something,
between the falling manna and the desert sand
I am discovered, I am,
and therefore can sleep.
It’s not the coffee that keeps me awake, it’s Kali.
Tried to work, but Kali goes around grousing in the corners, jealous and insecure, pouting lips and all.
Did laundry.
Bought new running shoes.
Received a book for translation and leafed through the next month’s work (while Kali grumbled), thought of Grundtvig (and Kali grumbled), wanted peace and quiet, wanted things brought back to earth (but Kali grumbled),
and it isn’t that I don’t like being the goddess of death, but I can’t stand still, I have to tromp on the floor in the laundromat, on the sidewalk, the grass, the ground, I thought
and went for a walk in the cemetery while the clothes were in the tumbler, and Kali cast dog turds, and as for me I scribbled down this inscription from Landlord Frandsen’s obelisk:
Eternity lasts a long time,
and I thought, Everything is so lovely, even the cinquefoil’s blooming,
and then we stood there and looked at it, me and Kali, we looked at the cinquefoil, which didn’t know any better (don’t smite it, Kali),
but then she smote it, she smote it on the yellow petals
because it ought to have known better,
it might have known that,
that this was how it would turn out,
that it would turn out how it did,
it might have known
everything!
Was awakened by the heat.
Went to the flea market on Tullinsgade.
Watched a bagpipe band march through Værnedamsvej and continue out to the Vesterbro quarter, and God knows where they are now.
Was at the home of someone I know and not a peep from Kali, Kali just sat there while we looked at pictures and spoke of the sort of things that women can speak of, sunscreen and our time in the Women’s Army Auxiliary, and in the absence of things to abuse, Kali took the back stairs and skedaddled, so I biked home alone.
Went for a run in the new running shoes,
ran, but fell at precisely the same spot where I’d always thought, I’m going to fall there someday.
Washed my knee off at the playground faucet, where kids were standing in line with their butts bare, and I stood in the back of the line like one of them, thinking scrapes were a chance to be comforted and expecting to pick off the scabs slowly soon afterward, and it would be a summer without short dresses.
Stopped by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave and looked at the birch tree that was planted over his coffin in 1903, bearing witness that Vilhelm Kyhn is extremely alive today.
Felt tired,
let things lie beside each other—
the frying pan, the dishrag, the joy, together with the insecurity and the French press; the shoes; the being inside, but outside, unseen, but discovered; the being hurt and the recovering, present, smarter, potentially happy, and entangled in will; and the dish towel—everything coordinated with a little prayer:
Have patience and confidence until the end.
Ate an apple in the middle of the night as the light seeped in over from Sweden.
Biked into Kastellet,
drank tea on a bench in the shade of a tree by one of the bastions,
plucked grasses and Queen Anne’s lace,
made the dust rise on the paths
and looked at that bronze angel who wants to walk across the water to southern Sweden, and it was chillier this winter, I thought, much chillier, and knowing that is something no one can take from me, but I can’t share it, I bear it with me like a song stuck fast in the throat, like when I was supposed to sing “The Blessed New Day” for confirmation,
and all that love has not been able to find peace since.
Watched a wooden ship squeeze into Copenhagen’s harbor (as if it were long ago).
Watched a man eat his meal by himself at a restaurant on Borgergade (as if it were long ago).
Biked through the city, just one person on wheels among thousands of others on the way home to their own, exhausted and holding every conceivable unshareable thing inside,
rubbed the skins off new potatoes
and set the grasses in a vase on the counter,
thought of blackbirds and other singing creatures,
of all there’s been, and tomorrow,
of my obligations, my dreams, my dusty sandals,
and then that which despite everything still calls,
Come.
Said, Now you’re going to take one day at a time.
Said, And this is the first of those days you’re going to take one at a time
and stood up then and had run out of milk.
Walked past the cemetery pigeons, and it isn’t that life goes on but that it’ll never stop,
was in the Frederiksberg Gardens,
hesitated by the pacifier tree and recalled Mom standing in a campground kitchen with a Swedish woman and a Dutch woman, the three of them busy looking into the bottom of a saucepan and taking ticks off some kid, and I never offered up even a single pacifier to the pacifier tree on the path to the Chinese Pavilion.
Bought a strawberry ice cream cone and couldn’t grow up, no matter how much I might want to.
Took the words from my mouth and laid them in a small white coffin.
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br /> Read in the shade of a cemetery tree,
read page after page in the scent of warm box and felt pain in my tooth,
but that didn’t matter.
Stopped by Kyhn’s grave on the way back, and it was the roses,
centifolia, multiflora, and Astrid Lindgren, and there I stood and set aside everything I hoped for, and it was as if he turned his head from his verdigris bronze plaque and gazed down at me:
Why, there we have you then, woman,
hover flies about your face
and utterly alone.
Stayed in bed taking another’s downfall to heart,
and stones deliberately thrown in the other Zealand blazed through me as if on a sonar, and now I don’t know what I fear most: the sound of bones being crushed against the floor or things that rise up in the air, that which we never forget or that which we brush off, pistols against temples or threats pointed inward, the inertia of sorrow or its release.
Promised to go to Tivoli (but declined the carousel in advance).
Went for a walk in the afternoon heat.
Had to stop frequently to rest a bit, for as soon as I feel alone inside, someone else steps on the stage.
Sat down by the goldfish pond,
thought of Indians, of clear skies and endless plantations. Thought of America, the heat, and another, of how I’d do violence to myself if I didn’t revisit those places that I had, without much success, already afflicted with my plaints.
Longed for the smell of winter’s cottages when they’re opened up in June.
Longed for northwest Jutland and read poems in the shade,
wanted to forget everything I hadn’t had, and which I should prepare to lose,
and chose the music on the lawn,
the soft ice cream and the helium-filled balloons,
the doubt, the sham happiness,
for I don’t know what I fear most, the sound of bones being crushed against the floor, or the sight of a child’s hand letting go of the string on Bugs Bunny
as easy as nothing.
Woke and rattled my arms.
Biked to the Open Air Museum in Brede.