The Half-Finished Heaven Read online

  that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,

  feeble and cold on the horizon.

  The train is entirely motionless.

  2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars.

  Kyrie

  At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.

  A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly

  through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,

  while I remain here and no one sees me.

  It is like the child who falls asleep in terror

  listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.

  For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks

  and the doors of darkness open.

  After the Attack

  The sick boy.

  Locked in a vision

  with tongue stiff as a horn.

  He sits with his back toward the painting of a wheatfield.

  The bandage around his jaw reminds one of an embalming.

  His spectacles are thick as a diver’s. Nothing has any answer

  and is sudden as a telephone ringing in the night.

  But the painting there. It is a landscape that makes one feel

  peaceful even though the wheat is a golden storm.

  Blue, fiery blue sky and driving clouds. Beneath in the yellow waves

  some white shirts are sailing: threshers—they cast no shadow.

  At the far end of the field a man seems to be looking this way.

  A broad hat leaves his face in shadow.

  He seems to look at the dark shape in the room here, as though

  to help.

  Gradually the painting begins to stretch and open behind the boy

  who is sick

  and sunk in himself. It throws sparks and makes noise. Every

  wheathead throws off light as if to wake him up!

  The other man—in the wheat—makes a sign.

  He has come nearer.

  No one notices it.

  Balakirev’s Dream (1905)

  The black grand piano, the gleamy spider,

  stood quivering in the center of its music net.

  The sounds in the concert room composed a land

  where stones were no heavier than dew.

  Balakirev though fell asleep during the music

  and in his dream he saw the Czar’s carriage.

  It was rolling over the cobblestones

  and straight on into the croaking, cawing night.

  He was sitting alone inside the cab watching,

  also he was running alongside on the road.

  He knew the trip had been long already,

  and the face on his watch showed years, not hours.

  A field appears in which a plough stood,

  and the plough was a bird just leaving the ground.

  A bay appeared where a destroyer stood,

  ice-locked, lights out, people on deck.

  The carriage rolled away over the ice, the wheels

  spinning and spinning with a sound like silk.

  A destroyer of the second class: Sevastapol.

  He was on it. The crew came toward him.

  “If you can play, you won’t have to die.”

  Then they showed him an amazing instrument.

  It looked like a tuba, or an old phonograph,

  or a section of some unheard-of machine.

  Helpless and afraid, suddenly he realized: it is

  the device that is used to power naval ships.

  He turned to the sailor standing nearest,

  waved his hand in despair, and said:

  “Imitate me, make the sign of the cross, make the sign!”

  The sailor stared full of grief like a blind man,

  opened his arms out, let his head fall—

  he hung there as if nailed to the air.

  Here are the drums. Here are the drums. Applause!

  Balakirev woke up from his dream.

  Applause-wings were flapping about the room.

  He watched the man at the grand piano stand up.

  Outdoors a strike had darkened the city streets.

  Carriages for hire rolled swiftly through the night.

  Milij Balakirev (1837–1910)

  Russian composer

  Prison

  Nine Haiku from Hällby Prison for Boys, Sweden

  1

  They kicked the football

  suddenly confusion—the ball

  flies over the wall

  2

  They make noise often

  as if to frighten time

  so it goes faster

  3

  Their lives are spelled

  wrong—but beauty survives

  just like tattoos

  4

  When the escapee

  was caught he had his pockets

  full of mushrooms

  5

  The noise from the shop

  and the heavy steps of the watchtower

  confuse the woods

  6

  The main gate slides up

  we stand in the prison yard

  it’s a new season

  7

  The mercury lamps

  come on—the pilot sees a patch

  of illusory light

  8

  Night—a twelve-wheeler

  goes by making the dreams of

  the inmates shiver

  9

  The boy drinks his milk

  and sleeps cozy in his cell

  a mother of stone

  The Couple

  They turn the light off, and its white globe glows

  an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet

  in a glass of darkness. Then a rising.

  The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.

  Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep,

  but their most secret thoughts begin to meet

  like two colors that meet and run together

  on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.

  It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer

  tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

  They stand packed and waiting very near,

  a mob of people with blank faces.

  C Major

  As he stepped out into the street after a meeting with her

  the snow whirled in the air.

  Winter had come

  while they were making love.

  The night was white.

  He walked fast from joy.

  The streets slanted down.

  Smiles passed—

  everyone smiled behind turned-up collars.

  How free it all was!

  And all the question marks started to sing about God’s life.

  That’s how it seemed to him.

  Music was free at last

  and walked through the blowing snow

  with long strides.

  All things around him on the way toward the note C.

  A trembling needle pointing toward C.

  An hour risen above anxieties.

  How easy!

  Everyone smiled behind turned-up collars.

  Allegro

  After a black day, I play Haydn,

  and feel a little warmth in my hands.

  The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

  The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

  The sound says that freedom exists

  and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

  I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

  and act like a man who is calm about it all.

  I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

  “We do not surrender. But want peace.”

  The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

  rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

  The rocks roll straight through the house

  but every pane of glass is still whole.

  Lamento

  He put the
pen down.

  It lies there without moving.

  It lies there without moving in empty space.

  He put the pen down.

  So much that can neither be written nor kept inside!

  His body is stiffened by something happening far away

  though the curious overnight bag beats like a heart.

  Outside, the late spring.

  From the foliage a whistling—people or birds?

  And the cherry trees in bloom pat the heavy trucks on the way home.

  Weeks go by.

  Slowly night comes.

  Moths settle down on the pane:

  small pale telegrams from the world.

  The Tree and the Sky

  The tree is walking around in the rain

  moving past us in the squishy gray.

  It has a job to do. It picks life out of the rain

  like a blackbird in a cherry orchard.

  As soon as the rain stops, the tree stops too.

  It simply stands, motionless in the clear nights,

  waiting just as we do for that moment

  when snowflakes will throw themselves out in space.

  A Winter Night

  The storm puts its lips to the house

  and blows to make a sound.

  I sleep restlessly, turn over, with closed

  eyes read the book of the storm.

  But the child’s eyes grow huge in the dark

  and the storm whimpers for the child.

  Both love to see the swinging lamp.

  Both are halfway toward speech.

  Storms have childlike hands and wings.

  The caravan bolts off toward Lapland

  and the house senses the constellation of nails

  holding its walls together.

  The night is quiet above our floor

  (where all the died-away footsteps

  are lying like sunken leaves in a pond)

  but outside the night is wild!

  A more serious storm is moving over us all.

  It puts its lips to our soul

  and blows to make a sound. We’re afraid

  the storm will blow everything inside us away.

  Dark Shape Swimming

  A Stone Age painting

  on a Sahara boulder:

  a shadowy shape that swims

  on some ancient fresh river.

  With no weapon, and no plan,

  neither at rest nor hurrying,

  the swimmer is parted from his shadow

  which is slipping along the bottom.

  He has fought to get free

  from millions of sleeping leaves,

  to make it to the other shore

  and join his shadow again.

  The Half-Finished Heaven

  Cowardice breaks off on its path.

  Anguish breaks off on its path.

  The vulture breaks off in its flight.

  The eager light runs into the open,

  even the ghosts take a drink.

  And our paintings see the air,

  red beasts of the ice-age studios.

  Everything starts to look around.

  We go out in the sun by hundreds.

  Every person is a half-open door

  leading to a room for everyone.

  The endless field under us.

  Water glitters between the trees.

  The lake is a window into the earth.

  Nocturne

  I drive through a village at night, the houses step out

  into the headlights—they are awake now, they want a drink.

  Houses, barns, nameposts, deserted trailers—now

  they take on life. Human beings sleep:

  some can sleep peacefully, others have tense faces

  as though in hard training for eternity.

  They don’t dare to let go even in deep sleep.

  They wait like lowered gates while the mystery rolls past.

  Outside town the road sweeps on a long time through the forest.

  Trees, trees silent in a pact with each other.

  They have a melodramatic color, as if in firelight.

  How clear every leaf is! They follow me all the way home.

  I lie about to fall asleep, I see unknown images

  and signs sketching themselves behind the eyelids

  on the wall of the dark. In the slot between waking and sleep

  a large letter tries to get in without quite succeeding.

  2. POEMS FROM

  Resonance and Footprints (1966)

  Night Vision (1970)

  Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (2013)

  Open and Closed Space

  With his work, as with a glove, a man feels the universe.

  At noon he rests a while, and lays the gloves aside on a shelf.

  There they suddenly start growing, grow huge

  and make the whole house dark from inside.

  The darkened house is out in the April winds.

  “Amnesty,” the grass whispers, “amnesty.”

  A boy runs along with an invisible string that goes right up into

  the sky.

  There his wild dream of the future flies like a kite, bigger than

  his town.

  Farther to the north, you see from a hill the blue matting of fir trees

  on which the shadows of the clouds

  do not move.

  No, they are moving.

  Lisbon

  In the suburb of Alfama the yellow streetcar tracks sang on the

  steep slopes.

  Two prisons were there. One was for thieves.

  They waved at us through their bars.

  And shouted that they wanted to be photographed!

  “Now here,” the guide said, giggling like a schizophrenic,

  “are the political prisoners.” I saw windows, windows, windows,

  and one man in a window high up

  who stood with a telescope looking out over the sea.

  Washing hung in the blue sky. The walls were hot.

  Flies were reading microscopic letters.

  I asked a woman from Lisbon about six years later:

  “Am I remembering it right, or did I dream it?”

  From an African Diary (1963)

  In the painting of the kitsch Congolese artists

  the figures are skinny as insects, their human energy saddened.

  The road from one way of life to another is hard.

  The one who has arrived has a long way to go.

  A young African found a tourist lost among the huts.

  He couldn’t decide whether to make him a friend or object of

  blackmail.

  The indecision upset him. They parted in confusion.

  Europeans stick near their cars as if the cars were Mama.

  Cicadas are strong as electric razors. The cars drive home.

  Soon the lovely darkness comes and washes the dirty clothes. Sleep.

  The one who has arrived has a long way to go.

  Perhaps a migratory flock of handshakes would help.

  Perhaps letting the truth escape from books would help.

  We have to go farther.

  The student studies all night, studies and studies so he can be free.

  When the examination is over, he turns into a stair-rung for the

  next man.

  A hard road.

  The one who has arrived has a long way to go.

  Morning Bird Songs

  I wake up my car;

  pollen covers the windshield.

  I put my dark glasses on.

  The bird songs all turn dark.

  Meanwhile someone is buying a paper

  at the railroad station

  not far from a big freight car

  reddened all over with rust.

  It shimmers in the sun.

  The whole universe is full.

  A cool corridor cuts through the spring warmth;

 
; a man comes hurrying past

  describing how someone right up in the main office

  has been telling lies about him.

  Through a backdoor in the landscape

  the magpie arrives,

  black and white, bird of the death-goddess.

  A blackbird flies back and forth

  until the whole scene becomes a charcoal drawing,

  except for the white clothes on the line:

  a Palestrina choir.

  The whole universe is full!

  Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing

  while I myself am shrinking.

  It’s getting bigger, it’s taking my place,

  it’s pressing against me.

  It has shoved me out of the nest.

  The poem is finished.

  Summer Grass

  So much has happened.

  Reality has eaten away so much of us.

  But summer, at last.

  A great airport—the control tower leads down

  load after load with chilled

  people from space.

  Grass and flowers—we are landing.

  The grass has a green foreman.

  I go and check in.

  About History

  I.

  One March day I walked down to the lake shore to listen.

  The ice was blue as the sky. And breaking up in the sun.

  The sun whispers into a microphone under the ice.

  There’s a seething and burbling. Far out it sounds like a sheet

  being snapped.

  The whole thing is like History: our present. We are lowered into it,

  we listen.

  II.

  Conferences resemble unstable and flying islands.

  Afterward: a long shaky bridge of compromise.

  All the traffic passes over that bridge beneath stars,

  beneath the pale faces of children not yet born

  who are cast off, nameless as grains of rice.

  III.

  In 1926, Goethe visited Africa disguised as Gide and noticed it.

  Some faces get clearer through what they’ve seen after death.

  When the daily news from Algeria arrived on the radio,

  I saw a big house and all the windows in the house were dark