The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Read online

  The Caravan bolts toward Lapland.

  And the house feels its own constellation of nails

  holding the walls together.

  The night is calm over our floor

  (where all expired footsteps

  rest like sunk leaves in a pond)

  but outside the night is wild.

  Over the world goes a graver storm.

  It sets its mouth to our soul

  and blows to produce a note. We dread

  the storm will blow us empty.

  BELLS AND TRACKS

  KLANGER OCH SPÅR

  1966

  Portrait with Commentary

  Here is a portrait of a man I knew.

  He’s sitting at the table, his newspaper open.

  The eyes settle down behind the glasses.

  The suit is washed with the shimmer of pinewoods.

  It’s a pale and half-complete face. —

  Yet he always inspired trust. Which is why

  people would hesitate to come near him

  for fear of meeting some misfortune.

  His father earned money like dew.

  But no one felt secure at home—

  always a feeling that alien thoughts

  broke into the house at night.

  The newspaper, that big dirty butterfly,

  the chair and the table and the face are at rest.

  Life has stopped in big crystals.

  But may it stop there only till further notice!

  •

  That which is I in him is at rest.

  It exists. He doesn’t notice

  and therefore it lives, exists.

  What am I? Now and then long ago

  I came for a few seconds quite close

  to ME, to ME, to ME.

  But the moment I caught sight of ME

  I lost ME — there was only a hole

  through which I fell like Alice.

  Lisbon

  In the Alfama quarter the yellow tramcars sang on the steep slopes.

  There were two prisons. One was for thieves.

  They waved through the grilled windows.

  They shouted to be photographed.

  But here,” said the conductor giggling like a split man,

  “here sit politicians.” I saw the façade the façade the façade

  and high up in a window a man

  who stood with a telescope to his eye and looked out over the sea.

  Laundry hung in blue air. The walls were hot.

  The flies read microscopic letters.

  Six years later I asked a woman from Lisbon:

  “Is it true, or have I dreamt it?”

  From an African Diary

  (1963)

  On the Congolese marketplace pictures

  shapes move thin as insects, deprived of their human power.

  It’s a hard passage between two ways of life.

  He who has arrived has a long way to go.

  A young man found a foreigner lost among the huts.

  Didn’t know whether to take him for a friend or a subject for extortion.

  His doubt disturbed him. They parted in confusion.

  The Europeans mostly stay clustered by the car as if it were Mama.

  The crickets are as strong as electric razors. The car drives home.

  Soon the beautiful darkness comes, taking charge of the dirty clothes. Sleep.

  He who has arrived has a long way to go.

  It helps perhaps with handshakes like a flight of migratory birds.

  It helps perhaps to let the truth out of the books.

  It is necessary to go further.

  The student reads in the night, reads and reads to be free

  and having passed his exam he becomes a step for the next man.

  A hard passage.

  He who has gone furthest has a long way to go.

  Crests

  With a sigh the elevators begin to rise

  in high blocks delicate as porcelain.

  It will be a hot day out on the asphalt.

  The traffic signs have drooping eyelids.

  The land a steep slope to the sky.

  Crest after crest, no proper shadow.

  We hunt for You, flying

  through the summer in cinemascope.

  And in the evening I lie like a ship

  with lights out, just at the right distance

  from reality, while the crew

  swarms in the parks ashore.

  Hommages

  Walked along the antipoetic wall.

  Die Mauer. Don’t look over.

  It wants to surround our adult lives

  in the routine city, the routine landscape.

  Éluard touched some button

  and the wall opened

  and the garden showed itself.

  I used to go with the milk pail through the wood.

  Purple trunks on all sides.

  An old joke hung

  as beautiful as a votive ship.

  Summer read out of Pickwick Papers.

  The good life, a tranquil carriage

  crowded with excited gentlemen.

  Close your eyes, change horses.

  In distress come childish thoughts.

  We sat by the sickbed and prayed

  for a pause in the terror, a breach

  where the Pickwicks could pull in.

  Close your eyes, change horses.

  It is easy to love fragments

  that have been on the way a long time.

  Inscriptions on church bells

  and proverbs written across saints

  and many-thousand-year-old seeds.

  Archilochos! —No answer.

  The birds roamed over the seas’ rough pelt.

  We locked ourselves in with Simenon

  and felt the smell of human life

  where the serials debouch.

  Feel the smell of truth.

  The open window has stopped

  in front of the treetops

  and the evening sky’s farewell letter.

  Shiki, Björling, and Ungaretti

  with life’s chalks on death’s blackboard.

  The poem which is completely possible.

  I looked up when the branches swung.

  White gulls were eating black cherries.

  Winter’s Formulae

  1

  I fell asleep in my bed

  and woke up under the keel.

  At four o’clock in the morning

  when life’s clean-picked bones

  coldly associate with one another.

  I fell asleep among the swallows

  and woke up among the eagles.

  2

  In the lamplight the ice on the road

  is gleaming like lard.

  This is not Africa.

  This is not Europe.

  This is nowhere other than “here.”

  And that which was “I”

  is only a word

  in the December dark’s mouth.

  3

  The institute’s pavilions

  displayed in the dark

  shine like TV screens.

  A hidden tuning fork

  in the great cold

  sends out its tone.

  I stand under the starry sky

  and feel the world creep

  in and out of my coat

  as in an anthill.

  4

  Three dark oaks sticking out of the snow.

  So gross, but nimble-fingered.

  Out of their giant bottles

  the greenery will bubble in spring.

  5

  The bus crawls through the winter evening.

  It glimmers like a ship in the spruce forest

  where the road is a narrow deep dead canal.

  Few passengers: some old and some very young.

  If it stopped and quenched the lights

  the world would be deleted.

  Morning Birds


  I waken the car

  whose windshield is coated with pollen.

  I put on my sunglasses.

  The birdsong darkens.

  Meanwhile another man buys a paper

  at the railway station

  close to a large goods wagon,

  which is all red with rust

  and stands flickering in the sun.

  No blank space anywhere here.

  Straight through the spring warmth a cold corridor

  where someone comes running

  and tells how up at the head office

  they slandered him.

  Through a back door in the landscape

  comes the magpie

  black and white.

  And the blackbird darting to and fro

  till everything becomes a charcoal drawing,

  except the white clothes on the washingline:

  a Palestrina chorus.

  No blank space anywhere here.

  Fantastic to feel how my poem grows

  while I myself shrink.

  It grows, it takes my place.

  It pushes me aside.

  It throws me out of the nest.

  The poem is ready.

  About History

  1

  One day in March I go down to the sea and listen.

  The ice is as blue as the sky. It is breaking up under the sun.

  The sun that also whispers in a microphone under the covering of ice.

  It gurgles and froths. And someone seems to be shaking a sheet far out.

  It’s all like History: our Now. We are submerged, we listen.

  2

  Conferences like flying islands about to crash . . .

  Then: a long trembling bridge of compromises.

  There shall the whole traffic go, under the stars,

  under the unborn pale faces,

  outcast in the vacant spaces, anonymous as grains of rice.

  3

  Goethe traveled in Africa in ’26 disguised as Gide and saw everything.

  Some faces become clearer from everything they see after death.

  When the daily news from Algeria was read out

  a large house appeared with all the windows blackened,

  all except one. And there we saw the face of Dreyfus.

  4

  Radical and Reactionary live together as in an unhappy marriage,

  molded by each other, dependent on each other.

  But we who are their children must break loose.

  Every problem cries in its own language.

  Go like a bloodhound where the truth has trampled.

  5

  Out on the open ground not far from the buildings

  an abandoned newspaper has lain for months, full of events.

  It grows old through nights and days in rain and sun,

  on the way to becoming a plant, a cabbage head, on the way to being united with the earth.

  Just as a memory is slowly transmuted into your own self.

  Alone

  1

  One evening in February I almost died here.

  The car skidded sideways on the ice, out

  onto the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars—

  their lights—closed in.

  My name, my girls, my job

  broke free and were left silently behind

  farther and farther away. I was anonymous

  like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

  The approaching traffic had huge lights.

  They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel

  in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.

  The seconds grew—there was space in them—

  they grew as big as hospital buildings.

  You could almost pause

  and breathe for a while

  before being crushed.

  Then something caught: a helping grain of sand

  or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free

  and scuttled smartly right over the road.

  A post shot up and cracked—a sharp clang—it

  flew away in the darkness.

  Then—stillness. I sat back still in my seatbelt

  and saw someone coming through the whirling snow

  to see what had become of me.

  2

  I have been walking for a long time

  on the frozen Östergötland fields.

  I have not seen a single person.

  In other parts of the world

  there are people who are born, live, and die

  in a perpetual crowd.

  To be always visible—to live

  in a swarm of eyes—

  a special expression must develop.

  Face coated with clay.

  The murmuring rises and falls

  while they divide among themselves

  the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

  I must be alone

  ten minutes in the morning

  and ten minutes in the evening.

  —Without a program.

  Everyone is lining up at everyone’s door.

  Many.

  One.

  On the Outskirts of Work

  In the middle of work

  we start longing fiercely for wild greenery,

  for the Wilderness itself, penetrated only

  by the thin civilization of telephone wires.

  •

  The moon of leisure circles the planet Work

  with its mass and weight. —That’s how they want it.

  When we are on our way home the ground pricks up its ears.

  The underground listens to us via the grassblades.

  •

  Even in this working day there is a private calm.

  As in a smoky inland area where a canal flows:

  THE BOAT appears unexpectedly in the traffic

  or glides out behind the factory, a white vagabond.

  •

  One Sunday I walk past an unpainted new building

  that stands in front of a grey wet surface.

  It is half finished. The wood has the same light color

  as the skin on someone bathing.

  •

  Outside the lamps the September night is totally dark.

  When the eyes adjust, there is faint light

  over the ground where large snails glide out

  and the mushrooms are as numerous as the stars.

  After Someone’s Death

  Once there was a shock

  that left behind a long pale glimmering comet’s tail.

  It contains us. It blurs TV images.

  It deposits itself as cold drops on the aerials.

  You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun

  among groves where last year’s leaves still hang.

  They are like pages torn from old telephone directories—

  the names are eaten up by the cold.

  It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing.

  But often the shadow feels more real than the body.

  The samurai looks insignificant

  beside his armor of black dragon scales.

  Oklahoma

  1

  The train stopped far south. It was snowing in New York.

  Here you could go about in shirtsleeves the whole night.

  But no one was out. Only the cars

  flew past in their glare, flying saucers.

  2

  “We battlefields who are proud

  of our many dead . . .”

  said a voice while I wakened.

  The man behind the counter said:

  “I’m not trying to sell it,

  I’m not trying to sell it,

  I only want you to look at it.”

  And he showed the Indians’ axes.

  The boy said:

  “I know I have a prejudice,

  I don’t want to be left with it, sir.

  What do you think of us?”


  3

  This motel is a strange shell. With a hired car

  (a huge white servant outside the door)

  almost without memory and without ploy

  at last I can settle on my point of balance.

  Summer Plain

  We have seen so much.

  Reality has used us up so much,

  but here is summer at last:

  a large airfield—the flight controller is bringing down

  load after load of frozen

  people from space.

  The grass and the flowers—here we land.

  The grass has a green manager.

  I report myself.

  Downpour over the Interior

  The rain is hammering on the car roofs.

  The thunder rumbles. The traffic slows down.

  Headlights are on in the middle of the summer day.

  Smoke pours down chimneys.

  All living things huddle, shut their eyes.

  A movement inwards, feel life stronger.

  The car is almost blind. He stops

  lights a private fire and smokes

  while the water swills along the windows.

  Here on a forest road, winding and out of the way

  near a lake with water lilies

  and a long mountain that vanishes in the rain.

  Up there lie piles of stones

  from the Iron Age when this was a place

  for tribal wars, a colder Congo

  and the danger drove beasts and men together

  to a murmuring refuge behind the walls,

  behind thickets and stones on the hilltop.

  A dark slope, someone moving

  up clumsily with his shield on his back

  —this he imagines while his car is standing.

  It begins to lighten, he rolls down the window.

  A bird flutes away to itself

  in a thinning silent rain.

  The lake surface is taut. The thunder-sky whispers

  down through the water lilies to the mud.

  The forest windows are slowly opening.

  But the thunder strikes out of the stillness!

  A deafening clap. And then a void

  where the last drops fall.