The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Read online

  All the old historians are there, they rise up and look into our family. Nothing is heard but their lips are always moving behind the glass (“Passchendaele . . .” ). It makes you think of an aged civil service department (a pure ghost story follows), a building where portraits of long-since-dead men hang behind glass until one morning vapor appears inside the glass. They began to breathe during the night.

  The bookcase is still more powerful. The glances straight across the border! A gleaming membrane, the gleaming membrane on a dark river the room must see itself in. And you cannot turn your head away.

  PATHS

  STIGAR

  1973

  To Friends Behind a Frontier

  1

  I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write

  swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship

  and drifted away at last through the night sky.

  2

  The letter is now at the censor’s. He lights his lamp.

  In the glare my words fly up like monkeys on a grille,

  rattle it, stop, and bare their teeth.

  3

  Read between the lines. We’ll meet in 200 years

  when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten

  and can at last sleep, become trilobites.

  From the Thaw of 1966

  Headlong headlong waters; roaring; old hypnosis.

  The river swamps the car cemetery, glitters

  behind the masks.

  I hold tight to the bridge railing.

  The bridge: a big iron bird sailing past death.

  Sketch in October

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

  It’s a heavy extinguished lamp in the cold.

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

  As if someone wanted to be fetched.

  On my way home I see mushrooms sprouting through the grass.

  They are the fingers, stretching for help, of someone

  who has long been sobbing alone down in the darkness.

  We are the earth’s.

  Further In

  On the main road into the city

  when the sun is low.

  The traffic thickens, crawls.

  It is a sluggish dragon glittering.

  I am one of the dragon’s scales.

  Suddenly the red sun is

  right in the middle of the windshield

  streaming in.

  I am transparent

  and writing becomes visible

  inside me

  words in invisible ink

  that appear

  when the paper is held to the fire!

  I know I must get far away

  straight through the city and then

  further until it is time to go out

  and walk far into the forest.

  Walk in the footprints of the badger.

  It gets dark, difficult to see.

  In there on the moss lie stones.

  One of the stones is precious.

  It can change everything

  it can make the darkness shine.

  It is a switch for the whole country.

  Everything depends on it.

  Look at it, touch it . . .

  The Outpost

  I’m ordered out to a heap of stones

  like a distinguished corpse from the Iron Age.

  The others are back in the tent sleeping

  stretched out like spokes in a wheel.

  In the tent the stove rules: a big snake

  that has swallowed a ball of fire and hisses.

  But out in the spring night it is silent

  among cold stones waiting for day.

  Out in the cold I begin to fly

  like a shaman, I fly to her body

  with its white marks from her bikini—

  we were out in the sun. The moss was warm.

  I flit over warm moments

  but can’t stop for long.

  They’re whistling me back through space—

  I crawl out from the stones. Here and now.

  Mission: to be where I am.

  Even in that ridiculous, deadly serious

  role—I am the place

  where creation is working itself out.

  Daybreak, the sparse tree trunks

  are colored now, the frostbitten

  spring flowers form a silent search party

  for someone who has vanished in the dark.

  But to be where I am. And to wait.

  I am anxious, stubborn, confused.

  Coming events, they’re there already!

  I know it. They’re outside:

  a murmuring crowd outside the gate.

  They can pass only one by one.

  They want in. Why? They’re coming

  one by one. I am the turnstile.

  Along the Radius

  1

  The ice-bound river is blazing with sun

  here is the world’s roof

  silence.

  I’m sitting on an upturned boat on the bank

  swallowing the drug of silence

  spinning gently.

  2

  A wheel spreads out endlessly, turns.

  Here is the center, almost

  still.

  Further out, perceptible movement: the steps in the snow

  the writing which shuffles along

  the façades.

  The rumbling traffic on the highways

  and the silent traffic

  of ghosts.

  And further out: the tragic masks in the headwind

  in the whine of speed—further out:

  the rush

  where the last words of love evaporate—

  the drips that creep

  on the steel wings—

  profiles that cry out—the suspended headphones

  chatter at each other—

  kamikaze!

  3

  The ice-bound river glitters and is silent.

  The shadows lie deep

  and voiceless.

  My steps were explosions in the ground

  that the silence paints over

  paints over.

  Looking Through the Ground

  The white sun is soaking through the smog.

  The light drips, gropes its way down

  to my deep-down eyes that are resting

  deep under the city looking up

  seeing the city from below: streets, foundations—

  like aerial photos of a city in war

  the wrong way around—a mole photo:

  silent squares in somber colors.

  The decisions are taken there. No telling

  bones of the dead from bones of the living.

  The sunlight’s volume is turned up,

  it floods into flight cabins and peapods.

  December Evening 1972

  Here I come, the invisible man, perhaps employed

  by a Great Memory to live right now. And I am driving past

  the locked-up white church—a wooden saint stands

  smiling, helpless, as if they had taken away his glasses.

  He is alone. Everything else is now, now, now. The law of gravity presses us

  against our work by day and against our beds by night. The war.

  The Dispersed Congregation

  1

  We made an effort, showing our homes.

  The visitor thought: you live well.

  The slum is within you.

  2

  Inside the church: vaults and columns

  white as plaster, like the plaster bandage

  around the broken arm of faith.

  3

  Inside the church: the begging bowl

  that raises itself from the floor

  and passes along the pews.

  4

  But the church bells must go under the earth.

  They hang in the sewage tunnels.


  They toll under our steps.

  5

  The sleepwalker Nicodemus on his way

  to the Address. Who has the address?

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

  Late May

  Apple trees and cherry trees in bloom help the town soar

  in the sweet dirty May night, white life jacket, my thoughts range out.

  Grasses and weeds with silent stubborn wingbeats.

  The mailbox shines calmly, what’s written can’t be taken back.

  Soft cool wind passes through my shirt and gropes for my heart.

  Apple trees and cherry trees, they laugh silently at Solomon,

  they blossom in my tunnel. I need them

  not to forget but to remember.

  Elegy

  I open the first door.

  It’s a large sunlit room.

  A heavy car passes in the street

  and makes the porcelain tremble.

  I open door number two.

  Friends! You drank the darkness

  and became visible.

  Door number three. A narrow hotel room.

  Outlook on a back street.

  A lamp sparking on the asphalt.

  Beautiful slag of experiences.

  BALTICS

  ÖSTERSJÖAR

  1974

  Baltics

  1

  It was before the age of the radio masts.

  Grandfather was a new-made pilot. In the almanac he wrote down the vessels he piloted—

  names, destinations, drafts.

  Examples from 1884:

  Steamer Tiger Capt. Rowan 16 ft Hull Gefle Furusund

  Brigg Ocean Capt. Andersen 8 ft Sandöfjord Hernösand Furusund

  Steamer St. Petersburg Capt. Libenberg 11 ft Stettin Libau Sandhamn

  He took them out to the Baltic, through the marvelous labyrinth of islands and waters.

  And those who met on board and were carried by the same hull for a few hours, or days,

  how much did they come to know one another?

  Conversations in misspelled English, understanding and misunderstanding but very little conscious falsehood.

  How much did they come to know each other?

  When it was thick fog: half speed, half blind ahead. At one single stride the cape emerged from the invisible and was right on them.

  Every other minute a bellowing signal. His eyes read straight into the invisible.

  (Had he the labyrinth in his head?)

  The minutes passed.

  Shallows and skerries he memorized like psalm verses.

  And that feeling of “we’re just here” that must be kept, like carrying a brimful pail without spilling a drop.

  A glance down in the engine room.

  The compound machine long-lived as a human heart toiled with great supple bouncing movements, acrobats of steel, and the smells rose as if from a kitchen.

  2

  The wind is in the pine forest. Sighing heavily and lightly.

  The Baltic is also sighing in the middle of the island, far within the forest you are out on the open sea.

  The old woman hated the sighing in the trees. Her face stiffened in melancholy when the wind picked up:

  “We must think about the men out in the boats.”

  But she heard something else as well in the sighing, as I do, we are kin.

  (We are walking together. She’s been dead for thirty years.)

  There’s sighing, yes and no, understanding and misunderstanding.

  There’s sighing, three sound children, one in a sanatorium and two dead.

  The great current that blows life into some flames and blows others out. The conditions.

  Sighing: Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

  You go on, listening, and then reach a point where the frontiers open

  or rather

  where everything becomes a frontier. An open place sunk in darkness. The people stream out from the faintly lit buildings. Murmuring.

  A new breath of wind and the place lies desolate and silent again.

  A new breath of wind, sighing about other shores.

  It’s about war.

  It’s about places where citizens are under control,

  where their thoughts are made with emergency exits,

  where a conversation between friends really becomes a test of what friendship means.

  And when you are with people you don’t know so well. Control. A certain sincerity is in place

  if only you don’t take your eyes off what’s drifting on the outskirts of the conversation: something dark, a dark stain.

  Something that can drift in

  and destroy everything. Don’t take your eyes off it!

  What can we compare it to? A mine?

  No, that would be too concrete. And almost too peaceful—for on our coast most of the stories about mines have a happy ending, the terror short-lived.

  As in this story from the lightship: “In the autumn of 1915 we slept uneasily . . .” etc. A drift-mine was sighted

  as it drifted slowly toward the lightship, then sank and resurfaced, sometimes hidden by the waters, sometimes glimpsed like a spy in a crowd.

  The crew was in a sweat and shot at it with rifles. No use. At last they put out a boat and made fast a long line to it and slowly and carefully towed it to the experts.

  Afterward they set up the dark shell of the mine in a sandy plantation as an ornament

  together with the shells of Strombus Gigas from the West Indies.

  And the sea wind is in the dry pines further away, hurrying over the churchyard sand,

  past the leaning stones, the pilots’ names.

  The dry sighing

  of great doors opening and great doors closing.

  3

  In the half-dark corner of a Gotland church, in a glimmer of soft mildew

  there’s a sandstone font—12th century—the mason’s name

  is still visible, shines out

  like a row of teeth in a mass grave:

  HEGWALDR

  the name’s left. And his pictures

  here and on the sides of other pots, human swarms, figures stepping out of the stone.

  There the eyes’ kernels of good and evil are split.

  Herod at table: the roasted cock flies up and crows “Christus natus est”—the waiter was executed—

  close by, the child is born, under clusters of faces dignified and helpless as those of young apes.

  And the fleeing steps of the pious

  echoing over dragon-scaled sewer openings.

  (The images stronger in memory than when seen direct, strongest

  when in memory the font turns like a slow rumbling merry-go-round.)

  Nowhere lee. Everywhere risk.

  As it was. As it is.

  Only in there is there peace, in the vessel’s water that no one sees,

  but on the outer walls the battle is raging.

  And peace can come drop by drop, perhaps at night

  when we know nothing

  or when you are lying in a hospital ward on a drip.

  People, beasts, ornaments.

  There is no landscape. Ornaments.

  Mr. B, my amiable traveling companion, in exile,

  released from Robben Island, says:

  “I envy you. I feel nothing for nature.

  But figures in a landscape, that says something to me.”

  Here are figures in a landscape.

  A photo from 1865. The steamer is at the pier in the sound.

  Five figures. A lady in a bright crinoline, like a bell, like a flower.

  The men are like extras in a rustic play.

  They’re all beautiful, irresolute, in the process of being rubbed out.

  They step ashore for a little while. They’re being rubbed out.

  The steam launch is an extinct model—

  high funnel, sunroof, narrow hull—

  it�
�s utterly foreign, a UFO that’s landed.

  Everything else in the photo is shockingly real:

  the ripples on the water,

  the opposite shore—

  I can stroke my hand over the rough rockfaces,

  I can hear the sighing in the spruces.

  It’s near. It’s

  today.

  The waves are topical.

  Now a hundred years later. The waves are coming in from no-man’s water

  and break on the stones.

  I walk along the shore. Walking along the shore is not as it was.

  You have to take in too much, keep up many conversations at once, you have thin walls.

  Each thing has acquired a new shadow behind the usual shadow

  and you hear it trailing along even in total darkness.

  It’s night.

  The strategic planetarium rotates. The lenses stare in the dark.

  The night sky is full of numbers and they are fed

  into a twinkling cupboard,

  a piece of furniture

  where there lives the energy of a locust swarm that denudes the acreage of Somaliland in half an hour.

  I don’t know if we are at the beginning or coming to the end.

  The summing up can’t be done, the summing up is impossible.

  The summing up is the mandrake—

  (See the encyclopedia of superstitions:

  MANDRAKE

  miracle-working plant

  which when torn out of the ground gave off such an appalling scream

  a man would drop dead. A dog had to do it.)

  4

  From leeward,

  closeups.

  Bladderwrack. The weed-forests shine in the clear water, they are young, you want to emigrate there, lie down full-length on your mirror image and sink to a certain depth—the weed that holds itself up with air bladders as we hold ourselves up with ideas.

  Bullhead. The fish who is a toad who wanted to become a butterfly and succeeded a third of the way, hides himself in the seaweed but is drawn up in the nets, hooked fast by his pathetic spikes and warts—when you disentangle it from the meshes your hands gleam with slime.