Re-revised translation of Kvernes by the Dutch poet C.O. Jellema

KVERNES

Sometimes, unforeseen, you arrive

where you want to be, lying in the grass,

eyes closed. What you saw: the reflected

blueing mountains, from shore to

shore a ferry a speck in the deep

crinkling water, close by the wooden

stave-old church of Kvernes, beneath

trees the stone moss-covered with its dead –

already pictured in your head, which shares

this with your hand that feels along the

church wall, the tread of your foot from

gravestone to gravestone; you lie with your

back to the rocky ground, a whispering

wind in the shell of your ear, you breathe in

the grass, the unscented warmth of

late sun, this transparent northern

September: here I am – briefly voided of

thinking, living a truth through the

senses more, all this which together

tells of the lasting (as if not

somewhere someone is murdered when

fleeing from hunger, as if not), this

wholeness behind my skin-thin eyelids – though

as usual wording wins through: so

here now my body, contentedly outstretched and

to me with what credible inner

eye perceptible as from above, resting there

in the grass by the edge of the fjord,

houses a landscape: it

became what it perceived, but knowing that

can’t last – for nowhere, not even

here, is arrival for ever.