Hugo Claus - Still Now

STILL NOW

I

Still now, on the gallows today, in her mouth a rag,

she who wakes with swollen lips, her eyes still closed,

she was something I knew and since have lost and how,

but how did I lose her, how does a drunk dog bark?

II

Still now, her face as the moon and her body as the moon

young, bitter young, with those breasts and buttocks and those ribs

Earlier you had love’s darts, you truly felt them there,

they scourged, you thought, that bright full moon of hers.

III

Still now her bitten nails, her bruised nipples,

her smooth buttocks between which she smiles her vertical smile

and she who reviled metaphysics said: ‘Oh, sweetie,

in each cell of your sperm sits God and his mother.’

IV

Still now the stripes scratches stains tattoos,

all wounds of love beneath her flimsy frock,

and I fear that this will remain, this nasty underhand

scratching and clawing for her undersize no man’s land.

V

Still now, completely still she lay excessively alone,

crosswise abandoned and with paralysed palate,

and I, just as motionless in my cell, I heard them,

the tinkling chains round her left ankle.

VI

Still now I know how tired and limp after languid lovemaking

she leant her head forwards almost shyly in the morning,

a duck that slid across the lake and sipped at the water

and then dipped down to me and bit and then never again.

VII

Still now I bind her jet-black hair in horny

crests and spears and spines and worship her as

totem and cross in my house that clumsily and hastily

changes into a temple for Love, the furtive goddess.

VIII

Still now all those rooms and nights and creamily nude

and all that sleep after and before and the scent of heather.

How she snored when I asked if she now was happy

and how she caressed the pillow plump next to me.

IX

Still now her limbs, all four busy, done in,

and her newly washed hair over her warm cheeks,

then she grasped my neck with her ankles, giggling executioner,

beheaded she offered me her cool glistening wound.

X

Still now I hoist a flag and raise my arms in the air

and shout ‘Comrade’. But she was the one who surrendered.

For on the battlefield I heard her stammeringly rave

with the accent of her mother, obscene syllables.

XI

Still now, when I am on the point of switching over

to that other life, she leads me as through black water

and peers and leers at me through her dangerous lashes

and laughs when dripping-wet I clamber up to her golden verge.

XII

Still now her whole body is crimson and glistening with sweat

and her openings slippery with baby oil.

Yet what I know of her remains a curious gesture,

something without echo, full of bitterness, chance and regret.

XIII

Still now I forget the gods and their ministers,

it is she who shatters, sentences and forgets me,

she of all seasons but above all of winter

for she becomes more beautiful and cold as I continue dying.

XIV

Still now among all women there is not one like her,

not one whose savage mouth has amazed me so much.

My besotted soul would tell of her if it could

but my soul was ravaged by all her belongings.

XV

Still now how she trembled with tiredness and whispered:

‘Why are you doing this? I’ll never let you go again, my king.’

There was no chillier prince than I and recklessly

I let her see how the King wept from his one eye.

XVI

Still now when I dare think of my lost bride

I quiver on my legs when I think of who’s now plucking her,

my wandering oleander of a bride who time and time

again pulls up the weed that is me from her pleasure garden.

XVII

Still now while the bees of death swarm around me

I taste the honey of her belly and hear the humming

of her coming and stare at the moist pink

leaves of her mobile flesh-eating flower.

XVIII

Still now our broad bed that smells of her and her armpits,

our pale bed shat upon by the birds of the world.

At the bird market she said: ‘I want that one, that wild one there,

that keeps on tapping with its beak against her tit.’

XIX

Still now, how she resisted and refused my mouth,

and only when I floored her with my nails in her breast

lay null and void and then, while I slept drunk on her abundance,

poked me up again like a hearth long since thought extinguished.

XX

Still now her mobile breast that lay there in my hands

and her lips thickened by my tooth-bites

and her bitten nails and bruised nipples,

and how she squinted in the angry morning light.

XXI

Still now I imagine that she in the narrow space of time

between me and the polar night has been the stars,

the grass, the cockroaches, the fruits and the worms

and that I accepted this and that it still delights me.

XXII

Still now, how to describe her hair, with what can I compare her?

Until I’m in my grave I’ll arrange her and tint

and spoil her and breathlessly blow her back to life

with my tiresome moaning, my nerve-racking whining.

XXIII

Still now her eyes with the mascara and the eye-shadow

and the scarlet lobes of her ears pierced.

‘I’ve a fever,’ she says, ‘ I can’t any more, I’ll kill

you, your fingers, no one else ever, nowhere, never.’

XXIV

Still now she’ll be nineteen, although she drinks quite a lot,

and too many tears have traced furrows over her

cheeks, war-paint and camouflage,

the mould and the rigorous frost of her life without me.

XXV

Still now if I should find her again like a fairy tale

of the moon after rain and lick once more her toes,

on my legs once more with my heart of stone I’m afraid a

weird weak song might be reawoken like one by Cole Porter.

XXVI

Still now, she more than the water in her curious body

a salt lake on which a duck would drift and stick

and I was that duck with a dick - hear me quack! - and she

being a lake rocked me on the waves or pretended to.

XXVII

Still now if I were to see her again with that shortsighted look

of hers, heavier in the hips and broader in the beam,

I would, I think, embrace her, drink once more of her,

no drone would be busier more joyful suppler.

XVIII

Still now while I sit entangled and entwined in her

the Destroyer is at work scorching humanity.

Respectable humans have lost their way

as after a fight without weapons and without winners.

Still now riveted in her fetters and with the bloody nose

of lovers I say, filled with her blossoming spring:

‘Death, torture the earth no longer, do not wait, dear death,

until I have finally come, but do as she and strike now!’