*
from
THROUGH THE FOREST
(1991/1996)
translated by
HILDI HAWKINS
There is so little that remains: the handful of last year’s snow
that I squeezed in my hand as we skied, the three of us,
towards Kvissental across the peat pond.
The wind in the heather between Vild and Audaku.
The scent of St John’s wort and marjoram tea in Aruküla in the early morning.
The tit that flew into the stove and was burnt to death.
A couple of folk songs, a wooden spoon,
the cockerel on St John’s church and a little piece of black bread,
we do not even know when and where from. What do they have in common?
We do not know that, either. Between the great fingers of the twilight,
which slowly close tight around us,
a few tiny crumbs sometimes fall. Something of us.
Something of the world. Something that remains undiscovered.
Goes on falling. We do not know where from, we do not know where to.
*
To eat a pie and to have it – I
sometimes succeed – I exchange
a piece of lived life for poetry, and then on
for roubles and kopecks – I live off that same
life, eat my own tail and shins
and they grow again, always anew
and the eagle of poetry rises again into flight
and tries to rise with me away from this world
towards a higher world, from which, once,
I was expelled. I remember it
and in my dreams I see it over and over again,
but in reality I do not know how to go there,
although I go on reading stories and folklore studies,
believing that one day I shall discover the way.
Then I shall still need wings. Only wings.
Perhaps my own.
*
Lines do not perhaps exist; there are only points.
Just as there are no constellations, only stars
which we combine into water carriers, fish, rams,
virgins, scorpions and ourselves.
Points are of themselves, lines of us.
Lines are not real. Constellations, contours, profiles,
outlines, ground plans, principles, reasons,
ulterior motives and consequences…
A solitary birch holds onto its last leaves by the woodshed.
Or the leaves hold onto the birch.
Or there is someone who holds onto them both,
like a child holding his father’s and mother’s hands at once.
I am sorry for them – the child, the leaves, the father, the birch and the mother.
But I do not know, really, for whom: if die birch exists,
if there are only points. I do not want the winter.
But I do not know whether the winter really exists. There are only points.
There are only molecules and atoms, which move increasingly slowly,
which is roughly the same as saying: warmth disperses
throughout space. Both the child’s hands were cold.
Night is coming – light is roughly the same as warmth.
Light scatters in the empty room. New thoughts
come so seldom. Your hand is warm. So is the night.
The poem is ready. If the poem exists at all:
there are only points. It is dark.
*
As the night begins, a forked birch captures
the light of a streetlamp and is as bright
as the nameless star that shines between its branches.
The snow remains in darkness, the snow slips the mind,
only the birch does not go, does not stay, and the star
in the dark sky, and the child who slithered
all the way home from school, slid, fell down
and got up again. But the snow slips the mind,
in the snow’s place is empty space, but it is perhaps
this which makes breathing so light
and the sky so deep.
*
I begin to wash my son’s shirt. In the pocket I find a piece of paper.
On it:
2: 06 27
An hour ago winter began. Now we are speeding towards
summer at 30 km/s. The sun is reflected in the window.
The washing is done. I come out. Under the Christmas tree, all the children’s animals are gathered in bunches: the tiger, the lion, six dogs, two bears, a squirrel, a beaver, two cats, a lizard and someone else besides.
Just as in the prophecy of Isaiah, in which ‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’.
I would then eat fresh bread and grapes.
Fresh bread and grapes, and in the evenings a little garlic.
What is the weather like now in Palestine? What is in flower there now?
I go to catch the bus. I stand by the roadside beside the hawthorn hedge and break off a
long thorn.
As a toothpick.
There are still a few frozen berries on the bush.
*
Think back to the vanished day
from which you are separated by sleep, restless, erotic.
Think, remember, find yesterday’s own face,
so that you will not be lost in oblivion, will not be lost
among similar faces, amid time
that has passed only in activity,
walking, talking, searching the shops for
a jacket or a desk, getting angry because
the table is so difficult to put together,
some bolts are damaged and there are none
in reserve – economic policy at screw level,
since at the same time metal is simply dug into the ground
by the ton – all of this creates
a background of irritation to the everyday, just like clouds,
through which so few things can reach,
a fresh thought, a fresh glance, a woman’s or a child’s
laugh, you note what gives even the day
most of the way it looks – the look of a living person,
you make contact, you are together, you draw
with a coloured pencil, Lemmit and Elo-Mall
draw too and when they ask what is it
you’re drawing you say, oh, nothing much.
*
Once, at a meeting, I was asked
to describe a poet’s day. So
I did:
I get up and make porridge for the children.
I take one child to school or study at home with the other.
I take the other child to school.
I go to the grocer’s shop.
I meet some friends in the town.
I talk on the telephone at home.
I do the laundry.
I clean the room.
I read a newspaper.
I write a little.
I make food for someone.
I eat.
I put one child in the bath and then settle it for sleep.
I make the bed.
I lie down.
I discuss the day’s news with my wife.
If I am not very tired, I read.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It was like this, or a little different.
It is like this, or a little different.
*
Death does not come from outside. Death is within.
Born-grows together with us.
Goes with us to kindergarten and school.
Learns with us to read and count.
Goes sledging with us, and to the pictures.
Seeks with us the meaning of life.
Tries to make sense with us of Einstein and Wiener.
Makes with us our first sexual contacts.
Marries, bears children, quarrels, makes up.
Separates, or perhaps not, with us.
Goes to work, goes to the doctor, goes camping,
to the convalescent home and the sanatorium. Grows old,
sees children married, retired,
looks after grandchildren, grows ill, dies
with us. Let us not fear, then. Our death
will not outlive us.
*
The wind does not blow. The wind is the process of blowing itself.
Can there be wind that does not blow? Sun that does not shine?
A river that does not flow? Time that does not flow.
For time is flux. But no one knows what it is that
flows. Or can there suddenly be
time that waits, that remains in one place like the lake
behind the dam? Can there be fire that has not yet
begun to burn, that has not even begun to glow?
Can fire be cold? Can lightning not yet have struck?
Thoughts not yet be thought? Can there be life
that is not yet lived and will perhaps remain
an empty space, a black hole in a dry witches’-broom,
a wave that freezes before it reaches the shore and now
gazes at me from the edge of the table
and knocks at my heart in my sleep?
*
You step into the morning, which every day grows
darker and darker. Two silent shapes
disappearing into the garage – the last I see of you.
Sleep will no longer come. The radio is playing music
which is as grey as the weekday morning.
Now you have already driven off, now turned on the headlights,
now you begin to move, reach the main road,
to flow with the sparkling flow of cars going to work and school,
you disappear beyond a curve and all that remains of you
is an image and belief and trust that you will come back,
and love, which may be greater yet,
still greater perhaps than the dark grey which is becoming light grey
in the yard, in the house, and in us.
*
The ticking of the clock fills the room.
Time conquers the room. Time and darkness,
in which you hear your own breathing, your eye-
lids’ untiring open-shut, open-shut
and – more than you would think – the beating of your heart,
life’s own biological clock, lub-dub, which is much older
than tick-tock, much closer to time itself,
time, which perhaps, really,
is something more than ticks and tocks,
is the voice of someone who has for two billion years
been wanting to say something to you, to life or to matter.
Perhaps this is the answer, one letter,
one syllable in an answer which, after two billion years,
is about to be completed.
*
A flock of jackdaws on the outskirts of the town – in the twilight
fluttering hither and thither in the wind and rain,
tearing apart like an old grey tea-towel,
a cloth forgotten in the washing-place in the yard
where in the rain, snow and sun
it slowly rotted, moved from the man-made world back into nature
and in the spring, when we tried to wipe our hands on it
it fell into shreds on the sprouting grass.
It, too, returns, only in a different form, as something else
and it is much more difficult to recognise than the grey birds
that, each evening, fly to the trees in the graveyard for the night
and, each morning, fly to the town and to the dumping ground
and one day, too, will decompose and meet
the old tea-towel and last year’s newspapers,
tin crowns from the Estonian time, Rinaldo Rinaldini and Tarzan,
me and you and all the encounters, passings-by,
which can somehow take on the appearance of you and me and the flock of jackdaws
and the tea-towel and the tin crown and the twilight.
*
I do not write, do not make poetry, about summer, about autumn,
about winter or about spring, about nature or about people.
I write about writing, about making poetry itself.
I am writing a poem, although I don’t know how,
I really don’t – if I did, I would do it all the time,
I would know beforehand what I will write, but I don’t know.
What comes, comes,
and sometimes does not come at all. I don’t know what it is
what (or who) brings to mind its beginning,
whether bird or butterfly, woman or child or word,
something you notice and see more clearly than at other times.
That I don’t know how to do either, sometimes it simply works,
I can’t direct my own eyes or mind, I don’t know
who or what directs them. What directs noticing,
understanding. If there’s something I can do, perhaps it’s
observing that observation, grasping that seeing.
If that’s knowledge; perhaps it’s the opposite.
Perhaps, after all, poetry comes entirely from ignorance,
is a particular sort of ignorance. And that
is much harder to learn than knowing.
*
I never weary of looking at leafless trees. Poplars,
lindens, birches – everything that can be seen
from my window. I do not know what it is in them that is at once
so strange and intolerably beautiful, so that I always want
to do something, want to draw them,
or describe them, although I do not know how.
I do not know, either, how to describe what I feel
as I sit at the window and watch the swaying of the branches
in the growing twilight, a few crows
in the top of the old ash, the birch in front of the woodshed.
I simply write about them, name them:
Populus, Tilia, Betula, Ulmus, Fraxinus,
as some read mantras, some name saints.
And I feel better. Perhaps I even know
that in those treetops, branches, in that ordinary,
windy pattern, drawn in black on grey,
is something much more. As in the hollow of one’s hand:
Nature. Fate. The future. The poplars character.
The birch’s fate. The lindens temperament. It is very hard
to explain in words. Without words
it is hardly easier. The worlds of people
and of trees are so different. But still,
there is something so human, almost intelligible,
in that tangle of branches. It is like a script,
like a language that I do not understand, although I know
that what is written there
has long been known to me; it cannot be much different
from what can be read in books,
hands or faces.
*
The most disconsolate of landscapes – a beach in autumn,
leafless brushwood, full of scraps of plastic, tin cans, condoms.
Lopsided changing rooms, a crow’s tracks
by the water’s edge on the wet sand, snails’ shells,
leafless branches, sodden roots
and everywhere the low low sky and clouds
rushing as if they were in a hurry
to get somewhere far away before the dark,
which has never really disappeared, which is always
in the same place between the bushes, billowing before your eyes,
eyeing you; which presses on your temples
like a damp hand. And still, in all this,
there is so much unintel
ligible light, and you cannot tell
whether it is shining from the outside in, or the inside out,
whether it is white or black or something completely different.
*
Silence. Dust
1
In the beginning is no beginning.
In the beginning is silence. Silence is within you. You dare not touch it prematurely – no one dares.
It is not worth being a ‘poet’ – writing poems, unless you cannot do otherwise – if you can, leave them unwritten.
Silence and light.
Bright silence, beneath which those words exist. Images. Pictures. Poetry.
Mouse nests. Spiders. Ticks. Queen bees. Clumps of grass.
The world under the clumps.
Albrecht Dürer and Harry Martinson. Dreaming forever of what they saw,
from which they got their picture or poetry. A clump with violets. Clumps – Tuvor.
Artist and poet hibernating in their own creation,
covered by written and unwritten pages.
Yet paper remains white rather than mottled, patterned, written upon.
Individual letters are like freckles, they don’t change anything much.
The bright silence remains. Snow, and beneath the snow, ice, and under the ice a current, quivering, arrowheads and spring moss.
Mouse tracks in the snow, which the wind wipes away. Snow dust spinning
over the emptiness, a couple of milkweed leaves and pieces of pine bark.
A couple of words. Laconic, far eastern, almost wordless wordsmanship.
White silence. An actor’s white make-up, beneath which, deep in the darkness, the face and the soul with their own passions.
A throaty song, a song that comes from the stomach, from a person’s centrepoint, his deepest part, his Marianas trench.
2
Wherever there is silence, dust gathers.
Dust wants peace. Dust gathers where there is little movement.
Dust comes
from near and far, from roads, ploughs, old fur coats, volcanoes and outer space.
Selected Poems Page 5