The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Read online

  In the silence he hears an answer coming.

  From far away. A kind of coarse child’s voice.

  It rises, a bellowing from the hill.

  A roar of mingled notes.

  A long-hoarse trumpet from the Iron Age.

  Perhaps from inside himself.

  Under Pressure

  The blue sky’s engine drone is deafening.

  We’re living on a shuddering worksite

  where the ocean depths can suddenly open up—

  shells and telephones hiss.

  You can see beauty only from the side, hastily.

  The dense grain on the field, many colors in a yellow stream.

  The restless shadows in my head are drawn there.

  They want to creep into the grain and turn to gold.

  Darkness falls. At midnight I go to bed.

  The smaller boat sets out from the larger boat.

  You are alone on the water.

  Society’s dark hull drifts farther and farther away.

  Open and Closed Spaces

  A man feels the world with his work like a glove.

  He rests for a while at midday having laid aside the gloves on the shelf.

  They suddenly grow, spread,

  and black out the whole house from inside.

  The blacked-out house is away among the winds of spring.

  “Amnesty,” runs the whisper in the grass: “amnesty.”

  A boy sprints with an invisible line slanting up in the sky

  where his wild dream of the future flies like a kite bigger than the suburb.

  Further north you can see from a summit the endless blue carpet of pine forest

  where the cloud shadows

  are standing still.

  No, are flying.

  An Artist in the North

  I, Edvard Grieg, moved like a free man among men.

  Ready with a joke, read the papers, traveled here and there.

  Led the orchestra.

  The concert hall with its lamps trembling in triumph like the train-ferry when it puts in.

  I have brought myself up here to be shut in with silence.

  My work-cottage is small.

  The piano a tight fit like the swallow under the eaves.

  For the most part the beautiful steep slopes say nothing.

  There is no passageway

  but sometimes a little hatch opens

  and lets out a strangely seeping light direct from trolldom.

  Reduce!

  And the hammer blows in the mountain came

  came

  came

  came one spring night into our room

  disguised as a beating of the heart.

  The year before I die I’ll send out four hymns to track down God.

  But it starts here.

  A song about what is near.

  What is near.

  The battlefield within us

  where we, the Bones of the Dead,

  fight to become living.

  In the Open

  1

  Late autumn labyrinth.

  At the entrance to the wood a discarded empty bottle.

  Go in. At this season the woods are silently deserted halls.

  Only a few kinds of noise: as if someone were cautiously removing twigs with tweezers

  or a hinge creaking faintly inside a thick tree trunk.

  The frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they have shriveled.

  They are like objects and garments found after a disappearance.

  Now twilight comes. It’s a matter of getting out

  and seeing your landmarks again: the rusty implement in the field

  and the house on the other side of the lake, a russet square strong as a bouillon cube.

  2

  A letter from America set me off, drove me out

  one light night in June on the empty streets in the suburb

  among newborn blocks without memory, cool as blueprints.

  The letter in my pocket. Desperate furious striding, it is a kind of pleading.

  With you, evil and good really have faces.

  With us, it’s mostly a struggle between roots, ciphers, and shades of light.

  Those who run death’s errands don’t avoid the daylight.

  They rule from glass stories. They swarm in the sun’s blaze.

  They lean across the counter and turn their head.

  Far away I happen to stop before one of the new façades.

  Many windows all merging together into one single window.

  The light of the night sky is caught there with the gliding of the treetops.

  It is a mirroring sea without waves, erect in the summer night.

  Violence seems unreal

  for a little.

  3

  The sun scorches. The plane flies low

  throwing a shadow in the form of a large cross rushing forward on the ground.

  A man is crouching in the field at something.

  The shadow comes.

  For a fraction of a second he is in the middle of the cross.

  I have seen the cross that hangs under cool church vaults.

  Sometimes it’s like a snapshot

  of something in violent movement.

  Slow Music

  The building is closed. The sun crowds in through the windows

  and warms up the surfaces of desks

  that are strong enough to take the load of human fate.

  We are outside, today, on the long wide slope.

  Many wear dark clothes. You can stand in the sun with your eyes shut

  and feel yourself being slowly blown forward.

  I come down to the water too seldom. But here I am now,

  among large stones with peaceful backs.

  Stones that slowly migrated backward up out of the waves.

  SEEING IN THE DARK

  MÖRKERSEENDE

  1970

  The Name

  I grow sleepy during the car journey and I drive in under the trees at the side of the road. I curl up in the back seat and sleep. For how long? Hours. Darkness has fallen.

  Suddenly I’m awake and don’t know where I am. Wide-awake, but it doesn’t help. Where am I? WHO am I? I am something that wakens in a backseat, twists about in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?

  At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel. Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora Overture) and the rescuing footsteps come smartly down the overlong stairway. It is I! It is I!

  But impossible to forget the fifteen-second struggle in the hell of oblivion, a few meters from the main road, where the traffic glides past with its lights on.

  A Few Minutes

  The squat pine in the swamp holds up its crown: a dark rag.

  But what you see is nothing

  compared to the roots, the widespread, secretly creeping, immortal or half-mortal

  root system.

  I you she he also branch out.

  Outside what one wills.

  Outside the Metropolis.

  A shower falls out of the milk-white summer sky.

  It feels as if my five senses were linked to another creature

  that moves stubbornly

  as the brightly clad runners in a stadium where the darkness streams down.

  Breathing Space July

  The man lying on his back under the high trees

  is up there too. He rills out in thousands of twigs,

  sways to and fro,

  sits in an ejector seat that releases in slow motion.

  The man down by the jetties narrows his eyes at the water.

  The jetties grow old more quickly than people.

  Their timbers are silvery grey, they have stones in their stomach.

  The blinding light beats straight in.

  The man traveling all day in an open boat

  over the glittering straits

  will sleep at last inside a blue lamp

  while
the islands creep like large moths across the glass.

  By the River

  Talking with contemporaries I saw heard behind their faces

  the stream

  that flowed and flowed and pulled with it the willing and the unwilling.

  And the creature with stuck-together eyes that wants

  to go right down the rapids with the current

  throws itself forward without trembling

  in a furious hunger for simplicity.

  The water pulls more and more swiftly

  as where the river narrows and flows over

  in the rapids—the place where I paused

  after a journey through dry woods

  one June evening: the radio gives the latest

  on the special meeting: Kosygin, Eban.

  A few thoughts drill despairingly.

  A few people down in the village.

  And under the suspension bridge the masses of water hurl

  past. Here comes the timber. Some logs

  shoot out like torpedoes. Others turn

  crosswise, twirl sluggishly and helplessly away

  and some nose against the riverbanks,

  push among stones and rubbish, wedge fast,

  and pile up like clasped hands

  motionless in the uproar . . .

  I saw heard from the bridge

  in a cloud of mosquitoes,

  together with some boys. Their bicycles

  buried in the greenery—only the horns

  stuck out.

  Outskirts

  Men in overalls the same color as the earth come up out of a ditch.

  It is an intermediate place, stalemate, neither city nor country.

  The high cranes on the horizon want to take the great leap but the clocks don’t want to.

  Cement pipes, scattered around, lick up the light with dry tongues.

  Auto body repair shops in former barns.

  The stones throw their shadows abruptly like objects on the surface of the moon.

  And these places just multiply.

  Like what they bought with Judas’s money: “the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.”

  Traffic

  The long-distance truck with its trailer crawls through the mist

  and is a large shadow of the dragonfly larva

  that stirs in the mud of the lake bed.

  Headlights meet in a dripping forest.

  One can’t see the other’s face.

  The flood of light pours through the needles.

  We come shadows vehicles from all directions

  in the twilight, drive together behind each other

  past each other, glide forward in a muffled clamor

  out onto the plain where factories brood

  and the buildings sink two millimeters

  each year—the ground is eating them slowly.

  Unidentified paws set their marks

  on the brightest products dreamt up here.

  The seeds try to live in the asphalt.

  But first the chestnut trees, gloomy as if

  they prepared a blossoming of iron gloves

  instead of white clusters, and behind them

  the company office—a faulty strip-light

  blinks blinks. There’s a secret door here. Unlock it—

  look into the inverted periscope

  downward, to the openings, to the deep tubes

  where the algae grow like the beards of the dead

  and the Cleaner drifts in his dress of slime

  with feebler and feebler strokes, on the point of suffocating.

  And no one knows what will happen, only that the chain

  perpetually breaks, perpetually joins together again.

  Night Duty

  1

  Tonight I am down among the ballast.

  I am one of the silent weights

  that prevent the ship from overturning!

  Obscure faces in the darkness like stones.

  They can only hiss: “Don’t touch me.”

  2

  Other voices throng, the listener

  glides like a lean shadow over the radio’s

  luminous band of stations.

  The language marches in step with the executioners.

  Therefore we must get a new language.

  3

  The wolf is here, friend for every hour

  touching the windows with his tongue.

  The valley is full of crawling axe handles.

  The night-flier’s din pours over the sky

  sluggishly, like a wheelchair with iron rims.

  4

  They are digging up the town. But it is silent now.

  Under the elms in the churchyard:

  an empty excavator. The scoop against the earth—

  the gesture of a man who has fallen asleep at the table

  with his fist in front of him. —Bell-ringing.

  The Open Window

  I stood shaving one morning

  before the open window

  one story up.

  I switched the razor on.

  It began to purr.

  It buzzed louder and louder.

  It grew to an uproar.

  It grew to a helicopter

  and a voice—the pilot’s—penetrated

  through the din, shrieked:

  “Keep your eyes open!

  You’re seeing all this for the last time.”

  We rose.

  Flew low over the summer.

  So many things I liked, have they any weight?

  Dozens of dialects of green.

  And especially the red of the wooden house walls.

  The beetles glistened in the dung, in the sun.

  Cellars that were pulled up by the roots

  flew through the air.

  Activity.

  The printing presses crawled.

  Just now the people were

  the only things that were still.

  They observed a minute’s silence.

  And especially the dead in the country churchyard

  were still

  as if sitting for a picture during the camera’ infancy.

  Fly low!

  I didn’t know where I

  turned my head—

  with a double field of vision

  like a horse.

  Preludes

  1

  I shy at something that comes shuffling crosswise in the sleet.

  Fragment of what will happen.

  A wall broken loose. Something without eyes. Hard.

  A face of teeth!

  A solitary wall. Or is the house there

  although I don’t see it?

  The future: an army of empty houses

  picking its way forward in the sleet.

  2

  Two truths draw nearer each other. One moves from inside, one moves from outside

  and where they meet we have a chance to see ourselves.

  He who notices what is happening cries despairingly: “Stop!

  Whatever you like, if only I avoid knowing myself.”

  And there is a boat that wants to put in—it tries just here—

  thousands of times it comes and tries.

  Out of the forest gloom comes a long boat hook, it is pushed in through the open window,

  in among the party guests who danced themselves warm.

  3

  The apartment where I lived the greater part of my life is to be cleared out. It is now quite empty. The anchor has let go—although we are still mourning it is the lightest apartment in the whole city. The truth needs no furniture. I have made a journey around life and have returned to the starting point: a blown-out room. Things I have been a part of here appear on the walls like Egyptian paintings, scenes on the inside of a burial chamber. But they are steadily being erased. For the light is too strong. The windows have become bigger. The empty apartment is a large telescope aimed at the sky. It is as silent as a Quaker service. What
can be heard are the backyard pigeons, their cooing.

  Upright

  In a moment of concentration I succeeded in catching the hen, I stood with it in my hands. Curiously, it did not feel properly alive: stiff, dry, an old white feather-trimmed woman’s hat, which cried out truths from 1912. Thunder hung in the air. From the wooden plank, a scent rose as when you open a photo album so aged that you can no longer identify the portraits.

  I carried the hen into the enclosure and let her go. Suddenly she was very much alive, knew where she was, and ran according to the rules. The hen-yard is full of taboos. But the earth around is full of love and tenacity. A low stone wall half overgrown with greenery. As dusk falls the stones begin to gleam faintly with the hundred-year-old warmth of the hands that shaped them.

  The winter has been hard, but now summer is here and the earth wants to have us upright. Free but wary, as when you stand up in a slim boat. A memory of Africa is wakened in me: on the shore at Chari, many boats, a very friendly atmosphere, the almost blue-black people with three parallel scars on each cheek (the Sara tribe). I am welcomed aboard—a canoe of dark wood. It is surprisingly rickety, even when I squat. A balancing act. If the heart lies on the left side you must incline your head a little to the right, nothing in the pockets, no large gestures, all rhetoric must be left behind. Just this: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out on the water.

  The Bookcase

  It was fetched from the dead woman’s apartment. It stood empty for a few days, empty until I filled it with books, all the bound ones, the heavy ones. In doing so, I let in the netherworld. Something rose from underneath, slowly and inexorably like a massive column of mercury. Your head couldn’t turn away.

  The dark volumes, closed faces. They are like Algerians who stood at the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint and waited for the Volkspolizei to examine their passports. My own passport has long since lain among the glass cages. And the haze of Berlin in those days is also inside the bookcase. An old despair tastes of Passchendaele and the Versailles Peace, tastes even older. The dark heavy tomes—I come back to them—are in reality a kind of passport, thick from having collected so many stamps through the centuries. Evidently you cannot travel with enough heavy baggage, now when you set off, when you at last . . .