The Half-Finished Heaven Read online

  like a man fallen asleep at a table,

  his fist thrown forward. Church bells.

  A Few Moments

  The dwarf pine on marsh grounds holds its head up: a dark rag.

  But what you see is nothing compared to the roots,

  the widening, secretly groping, deathless or half-deathless root system.

  I you she he also put roots out.

  Outside our common will.

  Outside the City.

  Rain drifts from the summer sky that’s pale as milk.

  It is as if my five senses were hooked up to some other creature

  that moves with the same stubborn flow

  as the runners in white circling the track as the night comes

  misting in.

  The Name

  I got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the side of the road. Rolled up in the backseat and went to sleep. How long? Hours. Darkness had come.

  All of a sudden I was awake, and didn’t know who I was. I’m fully conscious, but that doesn’t help. Where am I? WHO am I? I am something that has just woken up in a backseat, throwing itself around in panic like a cat in a gunnysack. Who am I?

  After a long while my life comes back to me. My name comes to me like an angel. Outside the castle walls there is a trumpet blast (as in the Leonora Overture) and the footsteps that will save me come quickly down the long staircase. It’s me coming! It’s me!

  But it is impossible to forget the fifteen-second battle in the hell of nothingness, a few feet from a major highway where the cars slip past with their lights on.

  Standing Up

  In a split second of hard thought, I managed to catch her. I stopped, holding the hen in my hands. Strange, she didn’t really feel living: rigid, dry, an old white plume-ridden lady’s hat that shrieked out the truths of 1912. Thunder in the air. An odor rose from the fence-boards, as when you open a photo album that has got so old that no one can identify the people any longer.

  I carried her back inside the chicken netting and let her go. All of a sudden she came back to life, she knew who she was, and ran off according to the rules. Hen-yards are thick with taboos. But the earth all around is full of affection and tenacity. A low stone wall half-overgrown with leaves. When dusk begins to fall the stones are faintly luminous with the hundred-year-old warmth from the hands that built it.

  It’s been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright. Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat. I remember a day in Africa: on the banks of the Chari, there were many boats, an atmosphere positively friendly, the men almost blue-black in color with three parallel scars on each cheek (meaning the Sara tribe). I am welcomed on a boat—it’s a canoe hollowed from a dark tree. The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels. A balancing act. If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right, nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind. Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out over the water.

  Conflict

  After a political argument or wrangle, I become lonesome.

  An empty chair opens out into the night sky.

  There is no way back. My friend leaves the house.

  A heavy moving van rumbles by on the road.

  My eyes rest there like wide-awake stones.

  (Note: This poem is taken from a letter to Robert Bly in October 1966. It is only included in the American edition of Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer and has never been published in Swedish.)

  Walking Running Crawling

  Walk among fallen trees a year after the storm.

  Wing-sound. Torn up roots

  turned toward heaven, stretching out

  like skis on someone jumping.

  Thirsty wasps hum low over the moss.

  And the holes, they resemble the holes

  after all those invisible trees

  that have also been uprooted these last years.

  I don’t even have wings. I pull my way forward

  in my life—the labyrinth

  whose walls you can see through—

  walking running crawling.

  (Note: This poem is taken from a letter to Robert Bly on July 8, 1972. It was published in the Swedish and American releases of Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer and has never been published outside this context in Swedish.)

  3. POEMS FROM

  Pathways (1973)

  Truth Barriers (1978)

  Elegy

  I open the first door.

  It is a large sunlit room.

  A heavy car passes outside

  and makes the china quiver.

  I open door number two.

  Friends! You drank some darkness

  and became visible.

  Door number three. A narrow hotel room.

  View on an alley.

  One lamppost shines on the asphalt.

  Experience, its beautiful slag.

  The Scattered Congregation

  I.

  We got ready and showed our home.

  The visitor thought: you live well.

  The slum must be inside you.

  II.

  Inside the church, pillars and vaulting

  white as plaster, like the cast

  around the broken arm of faith.

  III.

  Inside the church there’s a begging bowl

  that slowly lifts from the floor

  and floats along the pews.

  IV.

  But the church bells have gone underground.

  They’re hanging in the sewage pipes.

  Whenever we take a step, they ring.

  V.

  Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way

  to the Address. Who’s got the Address?

  Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.

  To Friends behind a Border

  I.

  I wrote sparsely to you. But everything I couldn’t say

  swelled up like some old-fashioned hot-air balloon

  and disappeared finally in the night sky.

  II.

  Now the censor has my letter. He turns on his light.

  My words, alarmed, fly up like monkeys in a cage,

  rattle the bars, hold still, and show their teeth.

  III.

  Read between the lines. We’ll meet two hundred years from now

  when the microphones in the hotel walls are useless

  and can finally fall asleep and be trilobites.

  Snow-Melting Time, ’66

  Massive waters fall, water-roar, the old hypnosis.

  Water has risen into the car-graveyard—it glitters

  behind the masks.

  I hold tight to the narrow bridge.

  I am on a large iron bird sailing past death.

  Sketch in October

  The tugboat is freckly with rust. What’s it doing here, so far inland?

  It is a thick lamp, gone out in the cold.

  But the trees have wild colors: signals to the other shore

  as if somebody wants to be rescued.

  On the way home, I notice inky mushrooms poking up through

  grass.

  They are fingers of someone asking for help,

  someone who has wept for himself a long time down there in

  the dark.

  We belong to earth.

  Further In

  It’s the main highway leading in,

  the sun soon down.

  Traffic backs up, creeps along,

  it’s a torpid glittering dragon.

  I am a scale on that dragon.

  The red sun all at once

  blazes in my windshield,

  pouring in,

  and makes me transparent.

  Some writing shows

  up inside me—words

  written with invisible ink

  appearing when t
he paper

  is held over a fire.

  I know that I have to go far away,

  straight through the city, out

  the other side, then step out

  and walk a long time in the woods.

  Walk in the tracks of the badger.

  Growing hard to see, nearly dark.

  Stones lie about on the moss.

  One of those stones is precious.

  It can change everything.

  It can make the darkness shine.

  It’s the light switch for the whole country.

  Everything depends on it.

  Look at it … touch it …

  Late May

  Apple and cherry trees in bloom help the town to float

  in the soft smudgy May night, white life jackets, thoughts go far

  away.

  Stubborn grass and weeds beat their wings.

  The mailbox shines calmly; what is written cannot be taken back.

  A mild cooling wind goes through your shirt, feeling for the heart.

  Apple trees and cherry trees laugh silently at Solomon.

  They blossom inside my tunnel. And I need them

  not to forget but to remember.

  December Evening, ’72

  Here I come the invisible man, perhaps in the employ

  of some huge Memory that wants to live at this moment. And I

  drive by

  the white church that’s locked up. A saint made of wood is inside,

  smiling helplessly, as if someone had taken his glasses.

  He’s alone. Everything else is now, now, now. Gravity

  pulling us toward work in the dark and the bed at night. The war.

  Seeing through the Ground

  The white sun melts away in the smog.

  The light drips, works its way down

  to my underground eyes that are there

  under the city, and they see the city

  from beneath: streets, foundations of houses—

  like aerial photos of a wartime city

  though reverse: a mole photograph …

  speechless rectangles in gloomy colors.

  Things are decided there. No one can tell

  the bones of the dead from those of the living.

  The sunshine increases, floods into

  cockpits and into peapods.

  Guard Duty

  I’m ordered out to a big hump of stones

  as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the Iron Age.

  The rest are still back in the tent sleeping,

  stretched out like spokes in a wheel.

  In the tent the stove is boss: it is a big snake

  that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.

  But it is silent out here in the spring night

  among chill stones waiting for the dawn.

  Out here in the cold I start to fly

  like a shaman, straight to her body—

  some places pale from her swimming suit.

  The sun shone right on us. The moss was hot.

  I brush along the side of warm moments,

  but I can’t stay there long.

  I’m whistled back through space—

  I crawl among the stones. Back to here and now.

  Task: to be where I am.

  Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd

  role: I am still the place

  where creation works on itself.

  Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks

  take on color now, the frostbitten

  forest flowers form a silent search party

  after something that has disappeared in the dark.

  But to be where I am … and to wait.

  I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused.

  Things not yet happened are already here!

  I feel that. They’re just out there:

  a murmuring mass outside the barrier.

  They can only slip in one by one.

  They want to slip in. Why? They do

  one by one. I am the turnstile.

  Along the Lines

  (Far North)

  I.

  Sun glints from the frozen river.

  This is the roof of the earthball.

  Silence.

  I sit on an overturned boat pulled up on shore,

  and swallow the silence-potion.

  I am slowly turning.

  II.

  A wheel stretches out endlessly, it is turning.

  The hub is here, is nearly

  motionless.

  Some movement farther out: tracks in the snow,

  words that begin to slide

  past building fronts.

  There’s a hum of traffic from the highway

  as well as the silent traffic

  of the dead as they return.

  Farther out: tragic masks bracing the wind,

  the roar of acceleration. Still farther away

  the rushing

  where the last words of love evaporate—

  raindrops that creep slowly

  down steel wings …

  Profile shouting—empty earphones

  clashing against each other—

  kamikaze!

  III.

  The frozen river gleams and is silent.

  Shadows here are deep

  and have no voice.

  My steps were explosions in the field

  which are now being painted by silence

  that paints them over.

  At Funchal

  (Island of Madeira)

  On the beach there’s a seafood place, simple, a shack thrown up by survivors of the shipwreck. Many turn back at the door, but not the sea winds. A shadow stands deep inside his smoky hut frying two fish according to an old recipe from Atlantis, tiny garlic explosions, oil running over sliced tomatoes, every morsel says that the ocean wishes us well, a humming from the deep places.

  She and I look into each other. It’s like climbing the wild-flowered mountain slopes without feeling the least bit tired. We’ve sided with the animals, they welcome us, we don’t age. But we have experienced so much together over the years, including those times when we weren’t so good (as when we stood in line to give blood to the healthy giant—he said he wanted a transfusion), incidents which should have separated us if they hadn’t united us, and incidents which we’ve totally forgotten—though they haven’t forgotten us! They’ve turned to stones, dark and light, stones in a scattered mosaic. And now it happens: the pieces move toward each other, the mosaic appears and is whole. It waits for us. It glows down from the hotel-room wall, some figure violent and tender. Perhaps a face, we can’t take it all in as we pull off our clothes.

  After dusk we go out. The dark powerful paw of the cape lies thrown out into the sea. We walk in swirls of human beings, we are cuffed around kindly, among soft tyrannies, everyone chatters excitedly in the foreign tongue. “No man is an island.” We gain strength from them, but also from ourselves. From what is inside that the other person can’t see. That which can only meet itself. The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent toward the good dark. A drink that bubbles in an empty glass. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.

  Calling Home

  A telephone call flowed out into the night, and it gleamed here and

  there in fields, and at the outskirts of cities.

  Afterward I slept restlessly in the hotel bed.

  I resembled the compass needle the orienteer runner carries as he

  runs with heart pounding.

  Citoyens

  The night after the accident I dreamt of a pockmarked man

  who walked along the alleys singing.

  Danton!

  Not the other one—Robespierre took no such walks.

  He spent one hour each day

  on his morning toilette, the rest he gave to the People.

  In the heaven of pamphleteering, among the mac
hines of virtue.

  Danton

  (or the man who wore his mask)

  seemed to stand on stilts.

  I saw his face from underneath:

  like the pitted moon, half-lit, half in mourning.

  I wanted to say something.

  A weight in the chest: the lead weight

  that makes the clocks go,

  makes the hands go around: Year I, Year II …

  A pungent odor as from sawdust in tiger cages.

  And—as always in dreams—no sun.

  But the alley walls

  shone as they curved away

  down toward the waiting room, the curved space,

  the waiting room where we all …

  For Mats and Laila

  The International Date Line lies motionless between Samoa and Tonga, but the Midnight Line slips forward over the ocean, over the islands and the hutroofs. On the other side they are asleep now. Here in Värmland it is noon, a hot day in late spring … I’ve thrown away my luggage. A dip in the sky, how blue it is … All at once I notice the hills on the other side of the lake: their pine has been clear-cut. They resemble the shaved skull-sections of a patient about to have a brain operation. The shaved hills have been there all the time; I never noticed them until now. Blinders and a stiff neck … Everything keeps moving. Now the hillsides are full of lines and dark scratches, as on those old engravings where human beings move about tiny among the foothills and mountains that resemble anthills and the villages that are thousands of lines also. And each human ant carries his own line to the big engraving; it has no real center, but is alive everywhere. One other thing: the human shapes are tiny and yet each has its own face, the engraver has allowed them that, no, they are not ants at all. Most of them are simple people but they can write their names. Proteus by comparison is a modern individual and he expresses himself fluently in all styles, comes with a message “straight from the shoulder,” or one in a flowery style, depending on which gang he belongs to just now. But he can’t write his own name. He draws back from that terrified, as the wolf from the silver bullet. The gangs don’t want that either, the many-headed corporation doesn’t want it, nor the many-headed State … Everything keeps moving. In the house over there a man lived who got desperate one afternoon and shot a hole in the empty hammock that was floating over the lawn. And the Midnight Line is getting close, soon it will have completed half its course. (Now don’t come and ask me if I want the clock turned back!) Soon fatigue will flow in through the hole burned by the sun … It has never happened to me that the diamond of a certain instant cut a permanent scar on my picture of the world. No, it was the wearing, the incessant wearing away that rubbed out the light and somewhat strange smile. But something is about to become visible again, the rubbing brings it out this time, it is starting to resemble a smile, but no one can tell what it will be worth. Not clear yet. Somebody keeps pulling on my arm each time I try to write.