Alphabet
Page 2
that the Teller group
performed on
Eniwetok where
the waves of the
Pacific raged in fury,
or any of all
the experiments that
the Sakharov group
performed on
Novaya Zemlya where
the waves of the Arctic
Ocean raged in fury
without these
experiments or those
of the British French
Chinese ever reaching
real real-
isation here where we
still live in a
real real
world as opposed to
the unreality of
Novaya Zemlya
and Eniwetok; here I
walk down to the still
blue of the Sound shining
with evening, toss
a stone into the water,
see how the circles
widen, reaching
even the farthest shores
12
life, the air we inhale exists
a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all,
an equation, an open and transferable expression
in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in
early summer, a passion, passion in it all,
as if in the air’s play with elm keys falling
like manna there existed a simply sketched design,
simple as happiness having plenty of food
and unhappiness none, simple as longing
having plenty of options and suffering none,
simple as the holy lotus is simple
because it is edible, a design as simple as laughter
sketching your face in the air
in mid-November, a season
when all human dreams are the same,
a uniform, blotted out history
like that of a sun-dried stone
a couple of mute parents stand there,
a dog and some children run round,
an arrival they try to imagine
as water that’s raised to my mouth
I lay sleeping inside my hotel room;
it was like an alien dream
that the guest before me must have shouldered
aside in his sleep and forgot
in the dream there was no one familiar;
I met only the blank scrutiny
of an apricot tree in bloom, turning
around as it left suddenly
perhaps it was left there one summer
when the world was as white as a feast,
before I had learned that a dreamer
must dream like the trees, be a dreamer
of fruit to the last
snow
is not snow at all
when it snows
in mid-June
snow has
not fallen from
the sky at all
in June
snow itself
has risen
and has bloomed
in June
as apple
apricot
chestnut trees
in June
to be lost
in real snow
which is June snow
in flower and seed
when you need never die
don’t panic; it’s bracken on a
trip, gathering time and
binding it; bracken has
its own calendar, tears and rain
and a little sunlight as black
as when black slugs carry it
around; ah, hear the tranquil
fronds and the undermost brown
seconds of the spores, ticking
still; perhaps they remember
how hidden we lay, how
hidden in places where
no people ever go we lay,
before we were born at last
and crept out; I look
back uneasily and the snow,
falling so thinly here this
morning, wakens carefully
and melts; a meadow lies
spread with lapwings; I walk
toward the sound; the ice
crackles icily, just as when
tears were once to he crushed
like pearls and strewn
over the patient; at last
the body is so salty that
its long story dissolves
the mirror; a little lint from a
quilt my mother must have shaken
disappears, and childhood
spreads ahead; over
by the window a little sunlight
is folded into place in the curtain
evening June sixteenth
from a train stopped too soon
I see that they’re dumping
live coals outside
the closed brickworks
maybe as usual they’re walking
down the path and away while
it gets ready to cloud up
and rain
only an edge of the farthest
fields is still in sun
so maybe it’s not coals at
all that I see
maybe it’s poppies, maybe
the closed brickworks is
a forest only partially
felled, maybe
it’s sheep walking down
the path, while the shadows from
a fence they pass
toss in gusts
it’s like looking
at an old painting whose
background is always being crossed
by a row of figures
not until it’s all magnified
do you realise that they
are either people going home from
a brickworks
tired soldiers on the march
or sheep running away
from a herd; in the foreground
sits the Madonna
in a matted thicket
of green blackberries
cobalt bombs exist
wrapped in their cloaks
of cobalt-60 isotopes
whose half-life
ensures the most
harmful effects
there’s no more to
say; we ensure that
the harm is as great
as it can be; there’s no
more to say; we
ensure ourselves all or
nothing; there’s no
more to say; by
ensuring that all
can be turned into
nothing, we
lose the capacity to
think of nothing,
of not a thing
in the world as we
say, when we simply
are being; there’s
no more to
say; we
ensure
that it’s all erased,
obliterated,
so the first
the crucial
nothing gets no chance
to make the poetry
that wind can make
in air or water;
there’s no more
to say; we kill
more than we think
more than we know
more than we feel;
there’s no more
to say; we hate;
there is no more;
like a regal bird
in its coffin of silt
in mud like a worm,
like a hawk
the storm has broken
like a grey parrot
dragged onto a steamboat
from someone’s plantation
I’ll live from now on
half-smothered, stuffed down
no one special among
all the traffic-worn doves
in whose last
clutch of feathers the hopeless
cloud cover of
peace
makes the human eye
plummet; that’s how I’ll live;
with my own little fine
half-life deep in
my heart; that’s how I’ll die,
I have said to myself
I will die, said it with
thanks for sorrow,
oblivion, done; said
to myself: think like
a bird building nests,
think like a cloud, like
the roots of the dwarf birch
think; like a leaf on a tree
thinks; like shadow and light,
like shining bark thinks,
like the grubs beneath
the barkskin think, like lichen
on a stone and a bit of dry rot
think, like the squawroot thinks,
like this misty forest clearing
thinks, like the marshes think
where the rising of the rainbow
is reflected, think like a bit of
mud, a bit of raindrop
thinks, think like a mirror
so vitally — see
on its throne of nothing
the sandstorm’s vortex;
see how banally enclosed
in the least small grain of
sand an ingenious
fossilised life rests up
from the trip; just see
how calmly it bears
the primal sea’s swarm
of beginnings; just see
how simple a sign
in which like a substance
the truth is reflected;
just see how
truly, graciously; let
things be; add
words, but let
things be; see
how easily they find
shelter by themselves
behind a stone; see
how easily they steal
into your ear
and whisper
to death to go away
13
metal, the ore in the mountain, exists,
darkness in mine shafts, milk not let down
from mothers’ breasts, an ingrown dread where
whisperings exist, whisperings exist
the cells’ oldest, fondest collusion
consider this market, consider this import
and export of fathers, half bullies
half tortured soldiers, consider
their barren last vanishing, metal
to metal, as the amount of unsown maize
grows and the water shortage grows
speak now of mildness, now of the mystery
of salt; speak now of mediation, of mankind, of
courage; tell me that the marble of banks
can be eaten; tell me that the moon is lovely,
that the extinct moa eats green melon,
that merriment exists, is thriving,
that moss animals and mackerel shoals exist, that
means of giving up, of descent, exist, and
physical portioning out, as in poems, of matchless
earthly goods, that pity exists
layered light, as if behind
layers in a fresco the snow
on the mountains, its shapes
so like bromine dissolved
hidden as always on sleeptrips
a bit of sun breaks through as
if from the earthside, eggs
crack and quick as an eddy
of chaffinches over the hedge
the flight of thoughts from my
body; their aliveness, beaks,
wings, and the closeness
of the others’ welcome as soon
as we alight on a birch and the
reason for our lives is revealed:
when the birches came to Lakselv
and founded the town they brought
along tufts of grass for a few sheep
so others than the leaves
could listen to the rustling
of the leaves and see how they
transform sunlight almost
as if to clear green water;
since then the sheep have sometimes
taken the birches along to the beach
a riddle for the reindeer at the
shoreline grazing
among half-furred stones, the last
bit of morning mist wrapped around
their greyish bodies, otherwise just
windless ice-turquoise sky
and the flower of an eider duck
on frost-stricken water
morning June twentieth
as if the hydrogen
at the stars’ cores
turned white here on earth
your brain can
feel white
as if someone had
pleated up time
pushed it in
through the door of
a room
where a table
two chairs and the unused
bed of the non-sleeper
crumble
in advance
as if haze from
alien space
travelled like angels
you sit
in your corner
until without any-
thing definite happening
you suddenly
get up
and go
like a bird that
invisibly wakens
and feeds its
unborn young
at midnight
when no one can
know whether things
as they are
go on
it’s new for me
to be hearing cicadas
here where it’s cold
and so there are none
perhaps it’s the kind
of thing that’s always happened
when the light travels north
and the birches go along
like when a room from
a dream on a trip
is the same room that you
come home and move into
there’s a drawing of
an encapsuled child
crouched inside a crystal
that’s not especially big
as if in dreams
dreamed not by people
animals or birds
but by insects perhaps
perhaps by the traveller
himself who is looking
away from himself for a while
and is spread in the birches’ haze
perhaps by a child who earnestly
examines a lake in the forest
and finds that the soul might well
have been dreamed by cicadas
it happens sometimes
when the snow melts
that all it has hidden
comes out so the soul can be seen
as when death doesn’t really
become visible until
somebody looks at the gift
that the dead person took to the grave
I think it must look like
the tarnished metal box
I’ve known for a long time
I’m carrying with me
it doesn’t contain
any more than a coin
a tooth, a silver thimble
and a little empty bottle
but its scent when
it’s opened
fills everything
like midnight sun
that’s how I’ve imagined
being able to imagine:
a space of clear crystal
around the deathbed
where the dead person first
really looks like himself
by dying away from the others
following the sleepwalkers’ trail now
on beneath the high plain’s
broad balsam skies
across an icelocked lake
along a windgrown isle
straight down through the fire
straight out through the snow
wrapped in the cloak of the wind
baked in the bread of the sun
thwarted long-lasting precise
breathed into the stone-mountain’s ice
over the grassblades’ spires
under the root system’s sores
out through the permafrost membrane
in through the iceplant’s hairs
rechristened in mountain coal
cupped in the high tarn’s eye
around a sunburst’s arms
between a light-chasm’s thighs
borne in the mountain king’s jewel chest
exalted, select, and fine
preserved in the cradle of air
gone on the rainbow’s paths
in through the shore lark’s egg
out through the sunlight’s wall
they silently travel
the Milky Way’s dust
they set up their tents
in the leaves of the stars
the chicory blooms
so endlessly blue
as if no one were
anything except small
I sit myself down
with my wide-awake doll
whose eyes made of glass
are so strange and so fair
my mother comes out
with a steaming bowl
some meat she has warmed
at the North Star’s fire
I talk with the doll
whose face looks like mine
about the good luck
that we cannot lose
so that we suddenly
are born, come to be
so that we all at once
meet others, increase
we borrow some fire
that’s beginning to catch
as if we ourselves
had been rendered from death
as if even stars
at a touch could grow soft
defoliants exist
dioxin for instance
denuding trees and
shrubs and destroying
people and animals
by spraying
fields and forests
we achieve fall and death
in the middle of the most
luxuriant summer;
this shifting of sorrow
this light-filled morning
was otherwise happily fair
but the grass is all gone
and a canopy’s spun
not of threads but of poisonous air
over forest and shore
over mouse over man
now the sky is a cavern
where withered birds
will rot like fallen fruit
where tractionless clouds
will atomise cities
and eddy them slyly in flight
like water through water
like sand through sand
even slugs with their slime-trails
are porous as mirrors
whose human reflections are lost
just the stalk of a nettle