Getting ready for June - a June poem by Lars Gustafsson

Sörby elegy

Wild chervil and camomile surge against the

slag foundations of foundries that once were there.

The swallows weave an invisible web, and inside,

in a paler light and with the scent of ageing wood,

here the summer grows still. Mild and patient,

as if only with difficulty they recall their places,

things from vanishing years hang and stand.

A fyke with an ring of silvery juniper that has

not caught a pike since the end of World War I.

A pike spoon made by Bricklayer Ramsberg,

a quiet man who had lost a thumb.

A small boat that was once owned by a child

put together of far too coarse blocks.

A peeling garden table that was owned

by a grandma who lived to be a hundred.

And the shadow beneath her raspberry bushes

passes for a moment, like a cloud,

a very small cloud in some other sky.

The grandfather’s hammer with its shiny haft.

Huge shears from a sheet-metal workshop in Nibble.

I am probably the last person who can remember

where they came from, from Platelayer Claeson in Nibble,

and after me they are free, as free as an arrow-head

that someone finds amongst the gravel of a river bed.

We give back, but only hesitatingly and meagrely.

How absent-minded and mild things become

when they are once more let loose, finally,

and gain their long summer vocation, from the human

domain, from intentions and actions and words.

How are they to recall their places in tables and drawers?

In song of bumblebees and smell of tar, in the darkness of

the shed it hangs, lies and stands: so many an abandoned thing

from some other year. And the June wind veers.

Five sonnets by Lars Gustafsson

Sonnet XIV

Lonely shoal that the same uncertain wave

constantly washes with the same short beat.

Anxiously leaning buoy, the same gull’s seat

day after day, beneath low skies that gave

off humidity and heat! And I gazed:

Eternity’s long been in motion here,

I should have seen it, for the law is clear,

relentless, that applies – each wave thus phased

proves the same thesis, and I should recall

just how it was, though can recall no more,

which makes this gull so crucial. Its beak’s caught

outlined against the waves. Scared its calm or

stubbornness might overcome me, both all

too great, across the waves my eyes still sought.

Sonnet XVII

Autumnal storm, warm wind. The moon obscured by trees.

A table, the boy just made out, dim from birth,

that scrapes the last drops from the bowl. This earth.

This warm wind. And now carried on this breeze

from a darkening lake a raw scent as of a

drowned man not recovered. And I, conferred

to be alive, walk through the grass. The selfsame word

for that autumnal water scent, the moon that hovers

anxiously on watch, and then the night that goes

on growing, the yellow light that lights a small square

of a courtyard, moist earth that has a scent

of rotting pears, the cat up on its toes

that slyly sneaks through shrubbery. And there

came no rain. That word would have been heaven-sent.

Sonnet XXIV

I know something about you you don’t know,

You are a dog. In frosty autumn earth

you’re digging for a hidden bumblebee. A word

for this could be a ‘truth affliction’. I know:

minus ‘truth’. Minus ‘affliction’. Secretly

we envy animals for this: there is no word

that captures what they do. Just as deferred

the outcome, wordless, with no uncertainty

through that thin body a fierce struggle streams.

You are a dog. The faint and stubborn sound

that leads you is an insect. And you don’t know

that you will die. Outer events it seems

All coincide. The same faint stubborn sound.

You know something about me I don’t know.

Sonnet XXVII

To one below the surface of the ice

the ice itself looks as if something white

and openings and wind wells where still quite

open water moves, look, if there’s a slice

of daylight left, as if expanses fraught

with darkness. And only he who knows aright

an exit lies in what is dark, that white

means darkness (that ice can so distort

conditions as they’re pictured by the eye)

and who, against his instinct, swims away

from light towards the dark sees day again.

There is, once a small habit stirs, or by

a word that changes meaning, a chance, though stray,

of someone getting out. That he sees day again.

Sonnet XXVIII

It’s late in coming. It had far to go.

There is no name for it but it’s called grief.

A clenched fist is no more than a frail sheaf

of brittle fingerbones – it’s hard to know

one’s weakness properly. And very few

can view their weakness as a strong safe lair.

One stands on some huge Gustav Adolf square

and sees oneself forsaken. It’s hard too

to cross a square like that. A hand that lies

open’s nearly always empty. And a cage

where no bird’s ever lived can easily

convey confusion. By what right do we

disdain a freedom that by nature, stage

by stage, would loosen cautiously all ties?

Palimpsest p. 438, top left-hand corner

ode to j m

you phoned me after

all these years and asked me if

perhaps we should meet

but i could hear from

your voice that everything was

as it had always

been that absolute

ly nothing had changed and that

therefore neither had

the reason for us

parting in the first place what

ever that had been

A May poem by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer

Late May

Apple trees and cherry trees in bloom help the place to float freely

in the lovely grimy May night, a white life-jacket, thoughts fan out wide.

Grass and weeds with silent stubborn wingbeats.

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

A mild cool breeze moves through the shirt and gropes for the heart.

Apple trees and cherry trees, they laugh silently at Solomon

they blossom in my tunnel. I am in need of them

not for forgetting but for remembering.

Store Bededag (The Great Prayer Day) in Denmark - time for the most Danish poem of them all! (revised 21.05.14)

Another Palimpsest poem from Klaus Høeck

ode to walt whitman

walt whitman old

poofter with stardust on the

blue drill of his shoul

ders i have not in

vestigated if you were

gay because i could

not care less – there is

nothing perverse between two

people that love each

other it is the

absence of love that promotes

that which is evil

This Sunday's poem in the Van Oorschot calendar is by Dèr Mouw

Young lovely, who with cool-white bridal gown

would much like to deny the sultry glow

that darkly makes her slimness shimmer so,

eyes sparkle, and hair form a gleaming crown,

she feels as if she goes now, one elect,

she she alone, to meet sheer Happiness:

her own house, husband handsome to excess,

in word and deed so noble, so perfect –

Already I see a tired face, greying hair;

the memory of a paradise, once fair

now lost, is in her eyes a listless gleam:

life threw her out, a flat-flailed sheaf of corn;

a docile drudge, dulled by the brood she’s borne,

with sagging belly, bourgeois, broad of beam.

One of about 250 in a row from 'Palimpsest' by Klaus Høeck

ode to the smell of firewood smoke

firewood smoke swirls up

in the memory sharper

than grated wasa

bi and it fills out

the sinuses resulting

in a final sneeze –

no forty years or

fifty have passed – somewhere or

other everything

is the same as be

fore is itself just like the smell

of firewood smoke