The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Read online

  They’re lit and quenched by headlong clouds

  that only when they shade the light betray

  their presence, like clouds of the past that scud

  through souls. When I walk past

  the stable wall I hear in all that noise

  the sick horse tramping inside.

  And there’s departure in the storm,

  by a broken gate that bangs and bangs, a lamp

  swaying from a hand, a beast that cackles

  frightened on the hill. Departure in the thunderous

  rumble over the byre roofs, the roaring

  in the telephone wires, the shrill whistling

  in the tiles on night’s roof

  and the tree tossing helplessly.

  A wail of bagpipes is let loose! A wail

  of bagpipes keeping step! Liberators.

  A procession. A forest on the march!

  A bow wave seethes and darkness stirs,

  and land and water move. And the dead,

  hidden under deck, they are with us,

  with us on the way: a voyage, a journey

  which is no wild rush but gives security.

  And the world is always taking down its tent

  anew. One summer day the wind takes hold

  of the oak’s rigging, hurls Earth forward.

  The lily paddles with its hidden webbed foot

  in the pond’s embrace—the pond which is in flight.

  A boulder rolls away in the halls of space.

  In the summer twilight islands seem to rise

  on the horizon. Old villages are on

  their way, retreating further into woods

  on the seasons’ wheels with magpie creaking.

  When the year kicks off its boots, and the sun

  climbs higher, the trees break out in leaves

  and take the wind and sail out in freedom.

  Below the mountain breaks the pinewood surf,

  but summer’s long warm groundswell comes,

  flows through the treetops slowly, rests

  a moment, sinks away again—

  a leafless coast remains. And finally:

  God’s spirit, like the Nile: flooding

  and sinking in a rhythm calculated

  in texts from many epochs.

  But He is also the immutable

  and thus observed here seldom. It’s from

  the side He crosses the procession’s path.

  As when the steamer passes through the mist,

  the mist that does not notice. Silence.

  Faint glimmer of the lantern is the signal.

  SECRETS ON THE WAY

  HEMLIGHETER PÅ VÄGEN

  1958

  • I •

  Solitary Swedish Houses

  A confusion of black spruce

  and smoking moonbeams.

  Here’s the cottage lying low

  and not a sign of life.

  Till the morning dew murmurs

  and an old man opens

  —with a shaky hand—his window

  and lets out an owl.

  Further off, the new building

  stands steaming

  with the laundry butterfly

  fluttering at the corner

  in the middle of a dying wood

  where the moldering reads

  through spectacles of sap

  the proceedings of the bark-drillers.

  Summer with flaxen-haired rain

  or one solitary thundercloud

  above a barking dog.

  The seed is kicking inside the earth.

  Agitated voices, faces

  fly in the telephone wires

  on stunted rapid wings

  across the moorland miles.

  The house on an island in the river

  brooding on its stony foundations.

  Perpetual smoke—they’re burning

  the forest’s secret papers.

  The rain wheels in the sky.

  The light coils in the river.

  Houses on the slope supervise

  the waterfall’s white oxen.

  Autumn with a gang of starlings

  holding dawn in check.

  The people move stiffly

  in the lamplight’s theater.

  Let them feel without alarm

  the camouflaged wings

  and God’s energy

  coiled up in the dark.

  The Man Who Awoke with Singing over the Roofs

  Morning. May rain. The city is still quiet

  as a mountain hamlet. The streets quiet. And in

  the sky a bluish-green aero-engine rumbles. —

  The window is open.

  The dream where the sleeper is lying prostrate

  turns transparent. He stirs, begins

  groping for attention’s instruments—

  almost in space.

  Weather Picture

  The October sea glistens coldly

  with its dorsal fin of mirages.

  Nothing is left that remembers

  the white dizziness of yacht races.

  An amber glow over the village.

  And all sounds in slow flight.

  A dog’s barking is a hieroglyph

  painted in the air above the garden

  where the yellow fruit outwits

  the tree and drops of its own accord.

  The Four Temperaments

  The probing eye turns the sun’s rays into police batons.

  And in the evening: the hubbub from a party in the room below

  sprouts up through the floor like unreal flowers.

  Driving on the plain. Darkness. The coach seemed stuck on the spot.

  An anti-bird screeched in starry emptiness.

  The albino sun stood over tossing dark seas.

  •

  A man like an uprooted tree with croaking foliage

  and lightning at attention saw the beast-smelling

  sun rise up among pattering wings on the world’s

  rocky island surging ahead behind banners of foam through night

  and day with white sea birds howling

  on the deck and all with a ticket to Chaos.

  •

  You need only close your eyes to hear plainly

  the gulls’ faint Sunday over the sea’s endless parish.

  A guitar begins twanging in the thicket and the cloud dawdles

  slowly as the green sledge of late spring

  —with the whinnying light in the shafts—

  comes gliding on the ice.

  •

  Woke with my girl’s heels clopping in the dream

  and outside two snowdrifts like winter’s abandoned gloves

  while leaflets from the sun cascaded over the city.

  The road never comes to an end. The horizon rushes ahead.

  The birds shake in the tree. The dust whirls around the wheels.

  All the rolling wheels that contradict death!

  Caprichos

  It’s getting dark in Huelva: sooty palm trees

  and the train whistle’s flurrying

  silver-white bats.

  The streets have been filled up with people.

  And the woman hurrying in the throng cautiously weighs

  the last daylight on the balance of her eyes.

  The office windows are open. You can still hear

  how the horse is tramping inside.

  The old horse with the rubber-stamp hooves.

  Not till midnight are the streets empty.

  At last in all the offices: it’s blue.

  Up there in space:

  trotting silently, sparkling and black,

  unseen and unbound,

  having thrown its rider:

  a new constellation I call “The Horse.”

  • II •

  Siesta

  The stones’ Whitsun. And with sparkling tongues . . .

  The city without weight in the midday hours.


  Burials in simmering light. The drum which drowns

  locked-in eternity’s pounding fists.

  The eagle rises and rises over the sleepers.

  Sleep where the mill wheel turns like thunder.

  Tramping from the horse with blindfolded eyes.

  Locked-in eternity’s pounding fists.

  The sleepers hang like weights in the tyrants’ clock.

  The eagle drifts dead in the sun’s streaming white current.

  And echoing in time—as in Lazarus’s coffin—

  locked-in eternity’s pounding fists.

  Izmir at Three O’Clock

  Just ahead in the almost empty street

  two beggars, one without legs—

  he’s carried on the other one’s back.

  They stood—as on a midnight road an animal

  stands blinded staring into the headlights—

  for one moment before passing on

  and scuttled across the street like boys

  in a playground while the midday heat’s

  myriad of clocks ticked in space.

  Blue flowed past on the waters, flickering.

  Black crept and shrank, stared from stone.

  White blew up to a storm in the eyes.

  When three o’clock was tramped under hooves

  and darkness pounded in the wall of light

  the city lay crawling at the sea’s door

  gleaming in the vulture’s telescopic sight.

  • III •

  Secrets on the Way

  Daylight struck the face of a man who slept.

  His dream was more vivid

  but he did not wake.

  Darkness struck the face of a man who walked

  among the others in the sun’s strong

  impatient rays.

  It was suddenly dark, like a downpour.

  I stood in a room that contained every moment—

  a butterfly museum.

  And the sun still as strong as before.

  Its impatient brushes were painting the world.

  Tracks

  2 AM: moonlight. The train has stopped

  out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town,

  flickering coldly at the horizon.

  As when someone has fallen into a dream so deep

  he’ll never remember having been there

  when he comes back to his room.

  As when someone has fallen into an illness so deep

  everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,

  cold and tiny on the horizon.

  The train is standing quite still.

  2 AM: bright moonlight, few stars.

  Kyrie

  Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.

  A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets

  in blindness and anxiety on the way toward a miracle,

  while I invisibly remain standing.

  As the child falls asleep in terror

  listening to the heart’s heavy tread.

  Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks

  and the doors of darkness open.

  • IV •

  A Man from Benin

  (On a photograph of a fifteenth-century relief in bronze

  from the African state of Benin, showing a Portuguese Jew.)

  When darkness fell I was still

  but my shadow pounded

  against the drumskin of hopelessness.

  When the pounding began to ease

  I saw the image of an image

  of a man coming forward

  in the emptiness, a page

  lying open.

  Like going past a house

  long since abandoned

  and someone appears at the window.

  A stranger. He was the navigator.

  He seemed to take notice.

  Came nearer without a step.

  In a hat that shaped itself

  imitating our hemisphere

  with the brim at the equator.

  The hair parted in two fins.

  The beard hung curled

  around his mouth like eloquence.

  He held his right arm bent.

  It was thin like a child’s.

  The falcon that should have had its place

  on his arm grew out

  from his features.

  He was the ambassador.

  Interrupted in the middle of a speech

  which the silence continues

  even more forcibly.

  Three peoples were silent in him.

  He was the image of three peoples.

  A Jew from Portugal,

  who sailed away with the others,

  the drifting and the waiting ones,

  the hunched-up flock

  in the caravel that was

  their rocking wooden mother.

  Landfall in a strange air

  which made the atmosphere furry.

  Observed in the marketplace

  by the African castmaker.

  Long in his eyes’ quarantine.

  Reborn in the race of metal:

  “I am come to meet him

  who raises his lantern

  to see himself in me.”

  Balakirev’s Dream

  (1905)

  The black grand piano, the gleaming spider

  trembled at the center of its net of music.

  In the concert hall a land was conjured up

  where stones were no heavier than dew.

  But Balakirev dozed off during the music

  and dreamed a dream about the czar’s droshky.

  It rumbled over the cobblestones

  straight into the crow-cawing blackness.

  He sat alone inside the cab and looked

  and also ran alongside on the road.

  He knew the journey had lasted long

  and his watch showed years, not hours.

  There was a field where the plow lay

  and the plow was a fallen bird.

  There was an inlet where the vessel lay

  icebound, lights out, with people on deck.

  The droshky glided there across the ice

  and the wheels spun with a sound of silk.

  A lesser battleship: Sebastopol.

  He was aboard. The crew gathered around.

  “You won’t die if you can play.”

  They showed him a curious instrument.

  Like a tuba, or a phonograph,

  or a part of some unknown machine.

  Stiff with fear and helpless he knew: it is

  the instrument that drives the man-of-war.

  He turned toward the nearest sailor,

  made signs despairingly, and begged:

  “Cross yourself, like me, cross yourself!”

  The sailor stared sadly like a blind man,

  stretched out his arms, sank his head—

  he hung as if nailed in the air.

  The drums beat. The drums beat. Applause!

  Balakirev woke from his dream.

  The wings of applause pattered in the hall.

  He saw the man at the grand piano rise.

  Outside the streets lay darkened by the strike.

  The droshkies were rushing through the dark.

  • V •

  After an Attack

  The sick boy.

  Locked in a vision

  with his tongue stiff as a horn.

  He sits with his back turned to the picture of the cornfield.

  The bandage around his jaw hinting at embalming.

  His glasses are thick like a diver’s. And everything is unanswered

  and vehement like the telephone ringing in the dark.

  But the picture behind him—a landscape that gives peace though the grain is a golden storm.

  Sky like blueweed and drifting clouds. Beneath in the yellow surge

  some white shirts are sailing: reapers—they cast no shadows. />
  There’s a man standing far across the field and he seems to be looking this way.

  A broad hat darkens his face.

  He seems to be observing the dark figure here in the room, perhaps to help.

  Imperceptibly the picture has begun widening and opening behind the sick brooding

  invalid. It sparks and pounds. Every grain is ablaze to rouse him!

  The other—in the corn—gives a sign.

  He has come close.

  No one notices.

  • VI •

  The Journey’s Formulae

  (from the Balkans, 1955)

  1

  A murmur of voices behind the plowman.

  He doesn’t look around. The empty fields.

  A murmur of voices behind the plowman.

  One by one the shadows break loose

  and plunge into the summer sky’s abyss.

  2

  Four oxen come, under the sky.

  Nothing proud about them. And the dust thick

  as wool. The insects’ pens scrape.

  A swirl of horses, lean as in

  grey allegories of the plague.

  Nothing gentle about them. And the sun raves.

  3

  The stable-smelling village with thin dogs.

  The party official in the market square

  in the stable-smelling village with white houses.

  His heaven accompanies him: it is high

  and narrow like inside a minaret.

  The wing-trailing village on the hillside.

  4

  An old house has shot itself in the forehead.

  Two boys kick a ball in the twilight.

  A swarm of rapid echoes. —Suddenly, starlight.

  5

  On the road in the long darkness. My wristwatch

  gleams obstinately with time’s imprisoned insect.

  The quiet in the crowded compartment is dense.

  In the darkness the meadows stream past.

  But the writer is halfway into his image, there

  he travels, at the same time eagle and mole.

  PRISON

  FÄNGELSE

  1959

  NINE HAIKU FROM HÄLLBY YOUNG OFFENDERS’ PRISON