Poem by the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson

KHUBLAI KHAN DEPARTS FROM XANADU

Yes every year the Khan leaves for home

from his country residence so well extolled by Coleridge,

the one in Xanadu, and more precisely

on 28 August the exodus takes place.

The Khan leaves Xanadu and milk

from white goats only

is hurled high into the air on his departure

to nourish the spirits of the air.

So says Marco Polo,

our Venetian witness.

So now it is 28 August anno 1270:

cranes in the sky and the Great Khan,

afflicted with arthritis, travels in a small house

borne on the backs of four elephants.

Clad on the outside with tiger skins

and on the inside with gilt-leather tapestries.

In this swaying room,

whose uterine movements

cannot be all that easy to imagine,

the Khan reclines stretched out on a divan.

But when cranes are within earshot,

Marco Polo relates,

the barons riding in

his retinue give a sudden warning.

The retractable roof is quickly rolled back

and the Khan’s gerfalcons

(of which he naturally always

has an abundance at the ready)

are thrown upwards and soar like arrows

into the already cooler autumn sky

out here on the northern steppes.

And the cranes do not escape them.

The Khan greatly appreciates

this kind of hunting.

Where the Khan is

it is still morning,

an autumnal morning

with cranes, but still early.

For several centuries

it is now afternoon.

Straight through

the old trees

sprung into leaf much too early

the sound of a nightingale

and the breaking of waves.

(In some other day)

Gottlob Frege dreamed a dream

of an arithmetic

where one times one made two

(so that the prime numbers no longer

were impossible to lose hold of)

and where ‘four’ was not ‘four’

four was something else than ‘four’

it was the number of horses

in the Emperor’s Quadriga

up there on the Brandenburg Gate,

and Chaplin and Einstein moved

by sheer coincidence

into the Adlon on the Pariserstrasse

in the same week

from where there is an excellent view

of the Emperor’s Quadriga.

They talked about the strange fact

that the laws of the universe

(at least superficially)

do not have much to do with each other.

Einstein spoke in favour of the unity formula,

a monotheistic equation

that would reduce

all of nature’s relations to a single one.

Chaplin suggested something else:

That many gods,

each in his own way a genius,

but also something of a bungler,

had each one of them left behind

traces of his universe.

Gravitation, old-fashioned grey

and above all else uncompromising,

was the oldest.

And the electromagnetic waves

so obviously created

by a completely different temperament

the latest to be invented.

But, Charlie added,

perhaps not the last.

Gods have to stay on the move

so as not

to lose their topicality.

An unexpected shower of

arrows fell from the darkened sky.

I sometimes dream

a strange dream

that everything is not as it should be.

I am living in a house

that is not mine.

It is much too big

and has floors

that I have never dared visit.

Something holds me back from doing so.

From the top floors

whose elegant, cushioned furniture

I only seem to glimpse

come cold gusts of air;

and from below, the cellar’s strange orangerie

come gusts far too hot.

What orchids thrive there

in the rows,

and what quick snakes does the

green shadow conceal beneath the leaves?

So I stay here

in these few rooms of a palace far too large

that I manage to keep

a reasonable room temperature in.

During the time that was my life.

And then high summer.

Not this

which you simply call such

but something stronger:

A real old-fashioned high summer

with the droning of bumblebees, the

discreet argumentation of the corncrake that

is both far away

and right inside your ear.

(There is a corncrake in the ear!)

The sharp

and slightly poisonous sting

from the pointed and red

dorsal fin of the perch.

And dead wasps

inside the window

mix their sourish scent

with that of dry

and now completely intractable

old wood.

And this fact of existence

about which the dead have completely forgotten

that it ever happened to them.

In actual fact a very strange state!

(Purely statistically

we do not exist

much longer than we exist.)

The lakes finally turn silver in hue

and it is not only the summer

that

moves towards its end

also this life.

Horizon and cranes.

Flooded land

is not the same as marshland.

In some of the pictures

of my long-since deceased

father’s photo album,

a document from 1929,

you can see how the Kolbäck river

has gone far beyond the usual limits

of its banks

and is transforming recently fertile meadows

into shallow lakes.

Marshland is designed to be

what it is, with meadow-sweet, water-lilies, cranes

but flooded land is

something else, less prepared

for what might come,

more exposed, how pathetic

when slender birches stand in mid-stream!

And many a one was surely flooded:

Gaspara Stampa says Rilke...

And all the other great lovers.

Oh silver colour of clouds and water

Oh this is still the starting time

And

Late-summer morning under a grey sky

faint scent of coffee on the stove

and the big heavy perch

already taken from the net.

And around their

gills still panting

the quietly melodic song of a wasp.

To exist

is to hear a stubborn buzzing note

that rises and falls in volume.

But this note and no other one.

And recently in this second world:

A pair of cranes flew over lake Hörende.

The mature summer’s signal

across the great bright lakes:

The cranes’ trumpets.

And if there were a falcon

one that does not murder

but observes everything

with sharp eyes.

Then I would send this my falcon

a bird of autumn and maturing

as close as the hard will

of the world allowed it

in their tracks,

non-existent in the air.

With the cranes.

Ever farther off

in the great whiteness

which is their second country.