by Hugo Claus
Can read with her lips something her sweetheart has written.
And before the poets, wasted winter apples
Scorned as too scrawny by the pickers,
Finally fall in November,
They want the neighbours to understand that fall
For posterity. In dairy words, ripening to mush like a pear.
Embittered, they keep listening for the crumpling
Of the newspaper that persists in misspelling their names,
Filling in their crossword puzzles
With anecdotes, anxiety and stumbling love.
But too late, too deaf, the poets realise
That what was dark and dull in their poems
Will not grow lighter through wear, with time,
But keeps on rotting. As unfathomable as ever:
Their homes, their words, the equator, the azure.
The sullen darkness remains as common as money
And as fleeting as death.
“But what about you? Yes, you! Didn’t you also worship
The scission, the seething, instead of the monument?
Searching for an epitaph in every motet?
Wringing an emblem out of every injury?
Didn’t you see your dented ego in every cappuccino?
—“It’s true. Upright yet, I dream of the literal.
Sure. Until the end, those embarrassments, radishes,
Paradises, roses, embellishments, tired comparisons. Up
To this sheet of paper, these corpses of letters.”
Adieu the poets write their whole lives long
And greying like lavender in November
They hang around, gangrene and gags and riddles,
Pathetically begging for mercy,
Like me for the wear on these eyes and ears
That loved you, that love you.
Ten Ways of Looking at P.B. Shelley
1
His body washed up on the beach
and lay there while the gold drained away
behind the mountains.
In his yellow trousers, in his white silk socks,
in Keats’s poems in his inside pocket,
the only moving things were worms.
O wild west wind,
breath of autumn’s being.
2
His face had been eaten away
by the creatures of the sea.
His spirit, which had eyes,
lips and nostrils,
saw the dreaming earth
and licked her,
breathing in the smells that destroy
and preserve at once.
3
All skin and bones, spastic.
(In pantomimes he always
played the witch.)
A shrill voice. A magpie’s eyes.
Girls at his knee.
And him just squawking
about angels of rain,
angels of lightning
that would come down tonight
on the blue planet.
4
He hated minced pork,
saints, devotion, the King.
But most of all he hated
one man and one woman
and their monogamous embrace.
Black rain, fiery hail
beat down on the fluttering locks
of the maenad wig
he’d put on.
5
There were many thorns, many bushes
into which he fell and bled.
But he always carried arsenic,
because who knows
if you will want to survive
the beauty of inflections?
Who knows if you wouldn’t rather
sink with no farewells
into the seaweed, untamed?
6
He once set fire to Mr. Laker,
the family butler. In Italy
he danced by the flames of a forest fire.
Later, in the shadow, grey
cold, after hours like icicles,
he whispered, “Hear, O hear,
the boughs of heaven and ocean,
tangled in each other.”
7
He ran screeching from his room,
he had seen, O, the fat women of Sussex
with eyes where the nipples should be.
Whereas usually in his wintry bed,
he saw a naked babe
rising from a purple sea.
O, lift me as a wave,
a leaf, a cloud.
8
For breakfast and lunch he ate bonbons.
Constipated from the laudanum.
Kidneys and bladder damaged.
His accents and rhythms
blow over the frozen earth.
Echoes of gods and blackbirds
and blasphemies.
9
He refused to wear woollen socks.
Butter made him gag.
Into Harriet, Mary, Clare and the rest,
he inserted a wine-soaked sponge
to prevent pregnancy.
On the edge of many circles
he wanted to banish himself.
He sank in his grand gestures,
the refusals.
10
When his fragments died,
he was interred as an ode and a pamphlet.
The Courier wrote: The infidel has drowned;
now he knows if there is a god or no.
He bounced the bawd of euphony
on his knee.
His heathenism, a remedy
when winter comes
on the west wind.
Lumumba
You gave the wet nurse a shock when you were born
by not crying,
a sign of a good conscience.
You studied at Louvain, a pale bastion.
They taught you L’Union fait la force.
Up on his cross the God of the Albinos
said his love knows no bounds
not even in the distant technicolor tropics.
Four-eyed thief and dreamer. Your name became
an insult in Belgian soccer stadiums.
You didn’t want to be the son of your forefathers,
not the Eldest, and not the Founder,
they never forgave you that.
The tribes sold you to Mobutu
for a telephone connection,
a license plate, a bank account.
The middlemen stepped in the mud
on your nameless cadaver.
The God of the Albinos has sat down
on your dead body as if on a toilet.
Italo Calvino
On the boat to America, after a late breakfast,
he would sit on the side of the swimming pool
and flirt. A different woman every day,
a journalist, a photo model, a housewife.
We, the other four writers, thought it grotesque.
We were just jealous.
He had the eyelashes of a girl,
the centuries-old scowl of Italian scepticism.
He looked after his complexion, his fingernails, his shoes.
For weeks we crossed the New Continent.
Days in the hot car, with the five of us.
He generally wanted to be behind the wheel, he drove too fast,
swerving too much because he was short-sighted
and too vain to wear his glasses.
He didn’t want to drive in the desert.
Holding forth on structure and concept,
on ultimate finiteness from the back seat
until he fell asleep mumbling dipping rhymes.
It is thirty years ago.
We wrote poetry back then without punctuation.
He had lived in the mountains with the partisans,
that makes you mistrust spontaneity.
He found the framework in most phonemes,
praising the skeleton in words and in women.
“Italo, for
God’s sake put on your glasses!”
“Vivere non basta, caro.”
The tumour had already nestled in under his elegant cranium.
Brother
“It’s hard,” he said, “bloody hard.
And unfair too. I’m finally losing weight.”
Autumn outside, a corn field stretching to the end of the road,
the words slip out, the end of the road.
He doesn’t say another word.
A plastic tube snakes down his throat.
He hiccups for hours. Can’t swallow.
Movement still in his right hand,
which carries the left like a fat lily.
The hand gives me a thumbs-up,
sending signals until his final collapse.
His skin has gone white, childlike.
He squeezes my frightened hand.
I still search for a similarity — ours,
her restlessness,
his impatience (no time for time),
the mistrust and gullibility of both—
and land in our first past,
the one with a world like a meadow with frogs,
like a ditch with eels,
and later, bets and dares, table tennis,
house rules, the 52 cards,
the three dice
and constant unbridled hunger.
(I grow old instead of you.
I eat pheasant and smell the woods.)
His housing is restricted now.
The machine breathes for him,
sucking up the phlegm.
A rattle from his diaphragm
and then his last movement, a sluggish wink.
The migration of a soul. A disposition. A portion cut off.
His body still shrinking
and then suddenly in the face that was dead,
a frown and a cramp
and then a gaping look of fury,
unbearably lucid, the anger and terror
of a tyrant. What does he see? Me, a man
turning away in cowardly surprise at his tears?
Then morning comes and they undo the straps.
And he is forever
from Cruel Happiness [1999]
What to Speak About
What to speak about tonight? Speaking
in a country we recognise, tolerate,
seldom forget.
This country with its slapstick genesis,
its clammy climate, its filthy stories
about the old days,
its inhabitants, grasping until they finally collapse
between the cauliflowers.
They keep on multiplying
in a paradise of their own invention,
craving happiness, trembling, mush in their mouths.
Like in nature,
where our runts of hills are depilated,
our fields scorched, our air poisoned,
yet the unsuspecting cows keep grazing.
Speaking about this country’s writing,
publications full of question marks
on patient paper
continually shocked by its history
and fleeing into deceptive shorthand.
Speaking about the heavy drapes
people draw around themselves.
But we hear them still, the stinking
primates who corner each other in rooms.
Like in nature,
where the hibiscus gives off no scent,
leaving that to the innocent cows who sink
into the drenched earth.
Speaking in this country of gleaming grass,
in which man,
that immoderate worm, that dreaming carcass,
lingers among the cadavers which, dead as they may be,
remain obedient to our memories.
Like our nature which expects a single, solitary
miracle that will eventually, finally
illuminate what one was,
not just this shabby spectacle
thrown together by time.
Speaking about time, which, so they say,
will remain like a brand and a palimpsest?
We lived in an age of using
and being useful.
What defence can we offer for that?
Which festive feathers in our caps?
Which song in the cellar? Maybe.
Say it. Maybe.
A few scratches on slate
to mark the silhouette of your lover.
Fingerprints in clay for her hips.
Phonemes of delight that sometimes resounded
as she, when she, cried out for you like a cat.
Speaking about her presence
wakens the violet hour of twilight.
Like in nature,
the merciless, glassy azure
of our planet seen from Apollo.
And even if your party hat begins
to weigh heavily from speech alone
and the lifeline on your palm
begins to fester,
still, nonetheless, in spite of this
honour the flowering
of the shades that inhabit us,
the shades that beg for comfort.
And stroke her shoulder blade.
Like a hunchback’s hump.
Still craving a cruel kind of happiness.
Interview
There’s a knocking on my door
and, yes, it’s the young poet
— I recognise his teeth—
who once sang the glory of my alliteration
and — oh, familiarity! — has gnawed
at my ankles in the papers ever since.
I bid him enter.
He says he lives from readings
and interviews for magazines.
His wife has been depressive since her teens.
I help him out of his coat.
I pour him a shot of jenever.
His letting me have it in the paper, he says,
was hard, a bitter cup, and not his intent.
It was forced on him by the editor of the cultural supplement.
Our talk would be, broadly speaking,
not too long, about love without stains,
and politics, without naming any names.
I pour him another drink.
“Between you and me,” he says, “I find you at odds
with the new,
not recognising the spirit of the age and
venerating dead masters far too much.
Where in your work is the exhilaration of technology?
Because if technology is our divinity and our destiny
shouldn’t we join together to reflect
on the laws of the Internet?”
Another jenever. With a beer chaser.
“And excuse me for saying so but
you’re sometimes very hermetic.”
Hermetic? Me? In my old age,
with my laughter tamed,
and my thunder all in vain?
Who sits here quivering,
copying the existing
all the same.
“And your rhyming patterns are so obvious,
so childishly obvious.
Rhyme doesn’t do a thing for me.
And apropos of that, what’s actually
the underlying concept in your flossofy?
You don’t leave me any the wiser.”
I think of an earlier life.
The rams’ heads clashed.
The rabbits all had names.
The turkeys gobbled for grain.
I shouldered my air rifle to shoot
the guinea fowl in their granny’s aprons.
I think of faraway countries.
The spectral moon rat that stays alive
because of its stench.
The lamp-eyed lemurs.
The orang pendek that steals children
and loves human liver.
I think of the dead masters.
/> Byron who kept and numbered
locks of his own hair. His manuscripts.
Lots of crossing out. Lots of second thoughts
but he always left the rhymes intact.
Ezra Pound in the cinema screaming
with laughter at idiotic comedies.
His Ezivursity.
How he kept silent for years and years
then said, “I did it all wrong.”
Stevie Smith who thought that everything
could swim in a wonderful wisdom.
“Stepping stones,” I say.
“Pardon?” he says.
“Stepping stones the poem can follow.
Gezelle and Minne
have led the way.”
And I help him into his coat.
And I lead him to the door.
Outside I point up at the moon.
He keeps staring at my finger.
from In Case of Emergency [2004]
Horizon
The horizon is the language, the language I am
expected to share
with the mutilated child,
the youth who’s become a soldier,
so proud of his boots,
the greybeard with his ripped bowels
in his arms.
It rains phosphorus and sirens.
The voices of my country,
mostly in the television.
Murderous families.
A criminal chorus.
And the blood-slurping gods all around.
Our Century
(for Pierre Alechinsky)
In my youth: smudges, curls
gouges
After my youth: coloured shadows
rusted, scorched
something like a past
written down, photocopied, enlarged
primary colours
— the reeds disobedient—
soot
hay
prickly or smothered in asphalt
Since my youth: salt and wind