by Hugo Claus
Her nails come close to my wood,
Her tainted claws awaken my skin,
She blares in my hair like a hunting horn.
She approaches in pleats and bolts,
In heat, in resin, in splashing,
While I, in a state of desire,
Extended like a rifle and
Ready to engage and kill,
Enclose, plough and fell,
Bending, kneeling, the heady animal
Between her leather-soft knees.
She splits my skittle
In the familiar warmth.
5
The husky night and the cart
Of time that drives into the night,
Rattling.
Your hair, the seagull nest.
The meerschaum hills in which,
Toothed, the fruit that splits.
The lizards, the stone woodpeckers
Swaying in the leaves,
In the furious leaves.
Hear the hooves of the horse Desire
Fleeing down the road.
Hear in the fields the moorcock, the hare,
The chattering teeth of love.
12
Her mouth: the tiger, the leap, the spinning top
Round and round to seven months of summer.
Her body: liana waiting to ignite.
A shell of wheat.
Flat is my white,
As white as a fish of stone.
I have been razed to the skin.
My population purged.
She has become someone else. Strange to my eye,
The one who lived in the scruff of my neck.
The Catchword: House
3
One leap
And I dived
Blind
Into the arms of a wind so bitter
The land let go its hold and I
Was impregnated by winter
And winter was the fury
Of my coagulating skin.
Darkness
Visited me
The blood
Of women asked and swiftly climbed and leapt
Into my backbone. And I became flesh and claw
And branch. Brittle
With desire I grew, a
Rider of the night-time
Strangers
Who I,
The animal,
Could no longer escape. In this season
Strangers
Are my life. Turning, they collapse,
As hot as women in the snow.
8
The night blows and beats its mutilated wings.
Rising from the uncertain earth the broken branch
Pierces my body.
Winter ends again and
No-one is mine.
From the avaricious woods,
The avaricious rats come riding through the grass.
12
Loneliness is a home.
(A home closes — warm
Lives a season in lodgings and
Becomes a face — soft
Is loneliness and ripens thought-
Fully from child to man and corpse.)
Don’t be like a home.
Love is a cramp and
(A murder) reaching for the
Moment: a dying executioner, a splitting conch.
Mirrors ripen. Don’t be like a mirror.
from A Painted Rider [1961]
N.Y
1
Over the rippled asphalt, through the steam
billowing from the grates,
three Black warriors carry a pink summer evening gown
like a senator’s wife.
On the concrete peninsula, in the bronze palaces
— drip trays for the growling jets above—
everybody buys the thinking man’s cigarette,
everybody chews their ground beef with nickel-plated teeth,
everybody washes in film-star milk.
What protects me from
this cannon fever?
A design around my left nipple
eloquently executed by Tattoo Joe,
the electric Rembrandt.
Chicago
Under the crossword of concrete beams,
between the peroxide bitches
and the gastric ulcer advertisements,
besieged by the bells of salvation’s armies
contaminated by soot and sugar
and humiliated by insulted Negroes,
a greyer desire awakens
in every desire.
And whiter gentlemen greet me,
a stranger in their nest,
a friend and fellow pest.
There is reason here to hang,
reason enough, no one gives a dang
between forgetting and release.
A verse from Luke won’t help you here,
nor a leather dragon on your back
nor chewing on the almond herb.
I’ll be replaced here soon
by a mouth full of grit.
Travelling
For nine days the lost donkey stood up to the buzzards,
now its remains are reeking on the roadside.
The sun, a stag that wants to catch the stars, those vultures,
doesn’t touch the riders,
begging by the wheels.
Girls who keep house in wooden boxes
make offerings to Jesus and Zapata.
On the way from Puerto Marqués to Oaxaca
I throw three hundred and eighty butts at wizened old men.
Uxmal
On the river sometimes when the strange weather
bursts into flame
a skeleton will sometimes creak
like a piece of furniture or a badly healed jaw.
This is what the natives hear. Unmoving.
Expressing no desires,
They ask no questions quickly shutting off, close-lipped,
they live in singular devastation.
Above the anthracite fields where Mayas
played ballgames in front of the House of the Dwarf
a vulture flicks its wing and swoops down on an anteater in the grass.
This is what we hear. And take photos of the prey.
Later we descend backwards from the Rain God’s altar
to avoid offending his eyes
and land in nettles.
(For the ladies every niche is dripping with phallic significance.)
We live in multiple bedazzlement.
She
1
Two horses in the hay, a grey and one with a blaze,
tied together and stamping,
a winter’s tale about that,
my memory of us already
homework for later days.
The contagion that transforms me
(a would-be hero becomes a shepherd
racing flames across the field)
distorts our gestures, animals and clouds.
In rooms I hear myself ask about before
and in the role of croaking judge
I speak of our old arbitrary horses
law and cancer.
2
Even if for you and me the world
has long been a domain of prickles and sponges,
we still ride down avenues.
Cured of stars but not yet addicted
to the manifold silence
we warm ourselves on the simple weather
and play in the hairy year
as if jumping at branches full of apples.
Playing, but dozens of horse flies from outside bite
and snitches from somewhere else cut me down to size.
“Look, a kite,” you say
and I see you burnt by phosphorus.
“Look, a beetle,” you say
and I see you crushed by a tank.
And beyond this, I sometimes think, you betray my voice,
but speaking without you is a plea to a mirror,
fle
eing into the worst kind of wood.
Often you are my voice, you,
a trap for hare’s tails, a cuckoo’s egg,
you, my bed.
6
Sometimes, outside of your presence,
I want to slide silence into the tipping day,
delaying the dissipation.
But outside muddled circles
the dancer does not live.
In every room your fussing lies in wait
in every breath your hooks still try their luck
and you chatter away, my marsupial,
yes, you, who conjugates my misery
as sweetly as the verb to fuck.
Sleep tight tonight, milady,
and eat your dreams raw.
Tomorrow my marrowbones will be ready again
for your miraculous mouths.
The Sphinx Speaks
You there on three legs, night is falling in the peaks,
an abyss is looming ahead
and will end your bitter drivel.
Seagulls still blow through your life,
but your shins are chalky
and your sowing is done.
No lamp in this debris, no watcher on the cliffs
where you shrink. For all that the taste
of almond still shakes you up,
as much as you’re an ape in your delusions,
you here on three legs, give up the fight
and say goodnight to your children.
A seagull is already skimming the sea
to catch you up with salt and sand.
The Panama Canal
When the news came — no news came.
We drilled to the stream’s grave and carved
through the hyacinths that smothered its bed
when the news came.
And the news, translated and suppressed, pierced our chests
and broke the already motionless rock in our crotch.
It was a judgement on our customs,
a white law, scarcely explained:
“No more fumes, no pipes, no powders or herbs,
no sniffing or sucking the life-giving grass.”
Then we sat down and became the slush
in the sludge of the dredging machines.
With transplanted brains, banished to the blood-sapping cold,
we sat down by the foreign sea.
Strangled our parents with their queues, hung our children
in a bunch from the crane
and waited under the buzzards for the surging tide
to catch us in its cloud-sown waves.
Message to the Population [1962]
(an appeal in an extremely free verse form, delivered at Amsterdam’s Krasnapolsky Hotel on 1 January 1962, and dedicated to two of those present: Remco Campert and Simon Vinkenoog)
~ ~ ~
My very dear friends,
Sometimes I tell a story (as one might expect of a poet)
About the winter which, in the white night,
Sends a flock of seagulls over the besieged city.
And then you nod, “Right, that’s a poet talking.”
And if in a romance I wish to record
The lamentations of the people in their gardens
You whisper, “Sure.”
Because I say so, because I am a poet.
But if I say, “Soon a gigantic wind will blow over you all,
A gruesome wind from God
And nothing will be left of any of you,”
Then you splutter and say, “He is a poet.”
(I.e., he should concern himself with books and broads,
but not with the delicate, fundamental, incalculable
cogs and wheels of politics and the intricate swinging system
of left and right, for and against, red or dead.)
My very dear friends,
On this winter’s day, the first of the year 1962,
There is much that I love, including, for example,
My wife, my three brothers, my father and my mother,
And there is much that I abhor, including, for example,
Those who have a lot of money when I have too little,
Writers who write badly and women without necks.
Well, of what I cherish and what I hate,
There will soon, after that wind, be nothing left.
Friends, God came to me and said,
“Claus, I made you out of nothing, what do you think of that?”
And I said, “Thank you very much, God.”
And he said, “And to nothing you will return. Huh?”
And I said, “Thank you very much, God. Just say the word.”
But then a man came up to me and said,
“I’d rather be dead than red,
And if I want to die then so do you.
I’d rather be one hundred per cent dead than just a little bit red.
All hands on deck, our ship will never sink.
None of us will ever be even a little bit pink!”
And I said, “Thanks a lot, man, but I pass.”
And he said, “Wars ennoble when they are noble wars,
fought for freedom’s holy cause.”
Then I said, “Thanks a lot, man, but I pass,
Because what’s going to come is no war
But a single gruesome, obscene wind from your God
And after that, nothing else.”
And I said, “I don’t want to see your God’s arse.”
Nothing else after that? Will all our eyeless
Toothless, chickenless grandchildren slough off
Their blistered skin down to the sixteenth toe?
Where in the blackest night does a blind man see a lighter black?
I hope that the gentlemen*
Will be able to explain that to you shortly.
I already know it all too well (I am a poet)
And it sickens me to realise
How I am making a fool of myself.
Because how can I make a fist?
One officer with a regulation truncheon
Would take care of the brainwork in my head in a jiffy.
Let alone: 3 police officers and 2,000 soldiers. Let alone the
Millions who would rather be red than dead.
There’s nothing to be done about it, so I do nothing
Except say these words, which also do nothing,
To you who also do nothing.
Admit it, it’s insane.
Because anyone who’s not spent and bent from hope and despair
Isn’t sitting here
But waiting in their warm house with coffee and cake
And calculating which corner of the cellar
Is best for the construction of a better, double, crossways cellar,
For later. When the wind comes.
My very dear friends,
When that wind descends over you tomorrow
And you are taken up in Gods’ fart
What good will hope and despair do you?
Let us head homewards,
Because don’t you see how paltry brittle fragile
This peace is,
When someone like me argues about it
And someone like you and you and you and you
With spent bent words and nicely flammable
Banners and books.
That is why, dear friends, there will be
No message from me on the first day of the year,
But an announcement for the population.
This is the announcement.
Go home. Later on television there will be
The Tales of Hoffmann, Eurovision.
Watch it.
Afterwards, once you have digested your evening meal
And your thought processes are a little slower,
Sit down in front of your mirror,
Pull out your breadknife,
Hold it against your throat, and recite
The prayer of those who order and rule
your days,
The prayer of your governments on earth,
Who are the bowels of God.
Our Father
Who art in Heaven
Blessed be Thy Bomb
Your Kingdom come
Your Megatons ignite here on earth
As they do in Heaven.
Give us this day our nuclear weapons
And forgive us our provisional peace
As we forgive those who annoy us by moaning for peace.
And lead us not into the temptation of disarmament
That we may incinerate and disappear
For ever and ever
Amen.
* At Krasnapolsky, the speakers after Claus were the clergyman Kater, the biologist Van der Lek, the teacher H. Herbers and councillor Van der Sluis-Fintelman.
from Peripheral Poems to L’Inferno, Canto XIII [1962]
1
Where are you going? Why? Hollow questions, these,
and perfectly suited to fathers and judges!
We danced around their questions, spinning, swish, swish,
we, perfectly vacuous, we, ornate dolls.
“Just don’t get us pregnant!” the girlies screeched
and the menfolk held back meekly
between a squeal and a bounce, and a pounce.
Oh no, nowhere on earth
did we feel more at home
than under the maddest of skirts.
But God sent down a surly aviator
to sprinkle his ingredients among us: