by Hugo Claus
But then there was a woman who kissed his hand
and wouldn’t let go.
That very night the Pope chopped that hand off.
That’s why one now kisses his feet.
IX
Even now, her limbs, all four of them at work, exhausted,
and her freshly-washed hair hanging down over her warm cheeks
as she grabbed my neck with her ankles, a giggling executioner,
beheaded, presenting me with the cool and glistening wound.
Just as the cell shapes itself to its minuscule prey,
obeying that which it will consume
and warming itself on its pseudopods,
uniting with it.
Admit it, admiration is called for.
X
Even now, I raise a flag and put my arms up in the air,
crying, “Comrade!” But she was the one who surrendered.
Because on the battlefield I heard her splutter and rage
in her mother’s accent, uttering filthy syllables.
Love, cinders and scrap metal,
bread and water
love, wake up
and approach from the void
that freezes me.
XI
Even now, when I am on the verge of crossing over
to that other life, she leads me as through black water,
ogling me and leering at me through her dangerous lashes,
laughing at me as I, drenched through, ascend her golden bank.
Above all else, without exception,
the forest path we follow is a labyrinth.
XII
Even now, her body is carmine and gleaming with sweat,
her openings all smooth and slippery with baby oil.
Yet what I know of her remains a strange gesture,
a thing with no echo, full of bitterness, chance and remorse.
Professor Policard said, “It’s so hot!
I have the impression a certain heaviness
has entered our synapses,
that in weather like this our neurons swell.”
XIII
Even now, I forget about the gods and their ministers,
she is the one who shatters, condemns and forgets me,
she, who is of all seasons but especially the winter,
growing colder and more beautiful the more I die.
Why don’t you say anything about the coldness of silence?
The self-satisfied destructive silence of Ajax,
Iole, Niobe, Achilles, you name it,
all prayers I wrote in my dotage
despite knowing better.
XIV
Even now, among all women there is not one like her,
not one whose furious mouth surprised me so much.
My foolish soul would tell of her if it were able,
but my soul has been plundered and razed to the ground.
And with the self-assurance of sleepwalkers
we keep skirting the issue.
XV
Even now, how she quivered with exhaustion and whispered,
“Why are you doing this? I will never let you go, my king.”
There was no colder monarch than me and recklessly
I showed her how the King’s one eye was watering.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek to the President of the Royal
Society in November 1677:
“What I investigate is only what,
without sinfully defiling myself,
remains as a residue after conjugal coitus.”
XVI
Even now, when I dare to think of my lost bride,
my legs tremble beneath me imagining who plucks her now,
my wandering oleander of a bride who won’t stop tearing
the weed that I am out of her garden of delight.
If you dare to think? Although while
constructing a consistent image
of your lady,
you forget time, mass and velocity!
Strange. Eros: a blind photographer.
XVII
Even now, with the bees of death swarming around me
I taste the honey of her belly and hear the buzz
of her orgasm and stare at the moist rose
petals of her pulsing carnivorous flower.
These symbols are multiplying
at an alarming rate. They’re a threat to existence itself.
Can’t the babbling in our tower of Babel
be a little clearer?
Maybe you should limit your writing,
do it on the wall.
XVIII
Even now, our wide bed that reeks of her and her armpits,
our pale bed shat upon by the birds of the world.
At the bird market she said, “I want that one, the wild one,
the one that can’t stop tapping its beak on that tit of hers.”
It is dangerous to believe
that you understand the least bit of it.
Much more than the unknown,
you should fear the known.
XIX
Even now, the way she resisted and refused my mouth,
lying limply only after I had floored her with my nails
in her breast, and then, while I slept, drunk on her abundance,
stoking me up again like a fire that had long seemed dead.
You can see it like this:
the physical corset in which a beetle grows
is responsible for the mental straitjacket
that regulates its patterns of behaviour.
XX
Even now, her supple breasts lying in my hands
and her lips thick from my nipping, biting teeth
and her chewed-down nails and her chafed nipples,
and how she squinted in the cruel light of morning.
“Now, now,” said Monsieur Paul
“Speculative thought never imagined
what the microscope has seen.
Come now, le vent se lève. Il faut tenter de vivre.”
XXI
Even now, I tell myself that in the straitened time
between me and the Arctic night, she was the stars,
the grass, the cockroaches, the fruit and the maggots,
and how I accepted this and how it delights me yet.
The beauty
who gives you the greatest pleasure,
what is her purpose?
At most she’ll scare the fish
when she jumps in the water.
XXII
Even now, how to describe her, what to compare her to?
Until I’m in my grave I will arrange her and paint her
and spoil her and, head spinning, blow her back to life
with my irritating complaints, my nerve-wracking moaning.
“You can say that again!
But I sympathise. After all natives
paint their faces
to protect themselves from the sun.”
XXIII
Even now, with her mascaraed lashes and her eye shadow
and her painted lips and her scarlet earlobes pierced.
“I’m burning up,” she said, “I can’t go on, I’ll murder you,
those fingers of yours, nobody else ever, nowhere, never.”
Not seeing something for what it is
is more treacherous
than faulty reasoning.
XXIV
Even now, she’s still nineteen despite how much she drinks,
and though the tracks of far too many tears have worn wrinkles
in her cheeks, carving through her camouflage and war paint,
the mould and freezing cold of her life without me.
We should examine
her biorhythm, her hormonal ebb and flood,
the behaviour of her enzymes, blood sugar and amino acids
when you’re not around.
XXV
Even now, if I could find her again as a fairyta
le
from the moon after a cloudburst and lick her toes again,
back on the road with my heart of stone I fear it would lead
to another horribly soppy song à la Cole Porter.
I’ve seen many a heart,
being a coroner, and I’ve yet to see one
that’s worn out nicely at the same rate
as the other organs.
XXVI
Even now, her more than the water in her miraculous body,
a salt lake on which a duck would float and stay
and that duck with a dick was me hear me quack! — and she
being a lake rocked me on her surging waves or pretended.
This is completely at odds with physics.
Although physics itself can also be seen as a protest
against the cult of common sense.
XXVII
Even now, if I could see her again with that short-sighted look
of hers, heavier around the hips and with a bigger bum,
I would, I believe, embrace her again and drink from her again,
a bee could not be happier, busier, lither and more limber.
Seduction changes us, obviously,
because we are
titillated, incited, spurred on
by one of our possibilities with that one possibility,
that spitfire,
determining the whole
and completely sweeping it, her, us, along.
XXVIII
Even now, with me entangled and knotted together with her,
the Destroyer is at work and scorching mankind.
People of standing are lost and cannot find their way
as after a battle without weapons or winners.
Even now, wearing her shackles and with the bloody nose
of a lover, I say, filled with her blossoming spring,
“Death, stop torturing the earth. Don’t wait, dear death,
for me to come, but follow her lead and strike hard!”
Envoi
My poems stand around yawning.
I’ll never get used to it. They’ve lived here
long enough.
Enough. I’m kicking them out, I don’t want to wait
until their toes get cold.
I want to hear the throb of the sun
or my heart, that treacherous hardening sponge,
unhindered by their clamour and confusion.
My poems aren’t a classic fuck,
they’re vulgar babble or all too noble bluster.
In winter their lips crack,
in spring they go flat on their back on the first hot day,
they ruin my summer
and in autumn they smell of women.
Enough. For twelve more lines on this page,
I’ll keep them under my wing
then give them a kick up the arse.
Go somewhere else to beat your drum and rhyme on the cheap,
somewhere else to tremble in fear of twelve readers
and a critic who’s asleep.
Go now, poems, on your light feet,
you haven’t stamped hard on the old earth,
where the graves grin at the sight of their guests,
one body piled on the other.
Go now and stagger off to her
who I don’t know.
from Sonnets [1986]
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 38
I
That almost everything attains perfection
for just a little moment and then snuffs out
accords with both the world and Einstein’s theory.
And that people grow like plants
under a single polluted sky
and decay together equally in memory
is guaranteed by the selfsame time
that’s breathing down my neck.
That’s why I must now desperately
sing the praises of that one night
I saw you on display,
your youthful enchantment unparalleled,
a naked monument with full impunity,
toppling over before my sight.
III
I thought (I’m often such a swine):
I’ll wait until the winter comes
and carves its lines around her mouth,
or for deceitful spring to envy her
and dig deep trenches in the field of her skin,
then she, like me, will bear the signs.
But suddenly this fall arrived, hazy, bright,
confusing and as blessed as my late love
and you remained unharmed, my love.
I even dared to entertain the thought
that the cold inside of me might never reach you,
and that you will never leave my side,
in horror at my deep-freeze breath. I believed it.
The way a bleeding corpse might still believe.
XIII
Sometimes I pray for a speedy death,
knowing that things of value must always beg,
that follies flourish all around
and truth falls here on barren ground.
The missiles of a scandalous encampment
are celebrated.
The laws of a treacherous government
are decorated.
Virtue is exhausted.
Evil is the captain.
Adieu, my swamp of a land
I want to sink like a stone.
So why don’t I do it?
It is too soon to leave her here alone.
XIV
When the copper kettle with the ash
of what I was is shaken upside-down
above the patient grass, my love,
don’t stand there like a clown.
Wipe the mascara from your face
and think of the fingers that wrote these lines
in the days we ached for each other,
and stroked you when they were still alive.
And laugh at what I was, and don’t forget
the snoring in the cinema,
the underpants that kept on slipping down,
the stupid jokes and the lumbering gait
that always brought me back to you
to take you in your warm abundance.
from The Traces [1993]
The Traces
of the one who tripped over his bag
of the blind man and the treed cat
of her name in the snow
The traces
of a life that couldn’t be a work of art
of preoccupied
and suddenly mottled hands
and a bruised pancreas that same week
The traces
of loss but no carping about that
even the ivy loses its suckers
The traces
of his father’s coat that was once a tent
for him and his broken tomahawk
The traces
of Mozartkugeln, being such a sweet tooth,
even for Milchrahmensahmenstrudel
The traces
of the fire-brigade siren and 5 Megatons
over Antwerp and the vomiting rats
one hundred dead boy scouts in the cellar
around the corner
The traces
of golden children’s tears: the resin of the cypress
of the tortoise shot to pieces
The traces
of the one who praised fragmentation
even though he clung to simplicity
him with his basketful of answers
The traces
of the dead bodies he climbed over
the mossy statues he gripped tight
the sheep with their false teeth
The traces
in haste, in innocence too
as incongruous as that sounds
(he was a poet for a few
years
but don’t ask when)
The traces
of goodbye of course
goodbye to Glenfiddich, toothache, sunglasses
strangers sobbing in bed
The traces
of the one who wasn’t present enough here
and remained unreconciled
in compassion too
The traces
of what was once a poem
mostly a comparison
and now a corpse of words
to one day thaw
The traces
of the one who specialised
in the sheepishness of love
because he saw that expectation in her eyes
The traces
of his singing saw
of a begging tomcat
of the collapsing plastic skeleton
of the sea finally without a murmur
Poet
Autumn. Listen. Clicking. Do you hear that deep clattering?
It’s coming closer: in our clothes, in our hair.
We’re lousy with sound. What is this leprous muttering?
Child, it’s only the poets outside with their teeth chattering.
The closer the poets get to their dying,
The more furiously they groan at the stars.
In the morning mist that melts their metaphors,
The poets freeze in their recognizable sports coats.
Hear how feverishly they explain their approaching demise,
Struggling to render their rattling transparent,
To ensure that their widowed readers are moved to tears.
“Oh, our egos were way too obscure!” they moan.
“The times required it, as multi-interpretable as we ourselves!”
And look, they’re crawling out of their souls’ bandages,
Mouths full of wine and cheese and pleas for mercy,
For their prostatism, their plagiarism.
One foot in the grave, the poets suddenly discover
The calming miracles of gods, aphorisms and aspirins,
Of tenderness. For the first time his sweetheart