Erik Lindegren: 'mannen utan väg' - last ten sonnets

XXXI

but when daybreak comes the city changes completely

the endless jubilation of saboteurs rings in the celebration’s ears

parks and streets and houses stray drunkenly past

and chat about cheerful memories of the bygone plague

views landscapes people shouts trumpets

and crown all that is dead to the charlatan himself:

my eye deceived us it sought only the bottom

the wall so it could appear as conqueror

that sacrificed lives my solitary life in a gravel pit

and blood and meaning seep down into the earth

I compared myself with us and nothing tallied

I killed you and me so that we both should live

with human lips heavy with death we were forced

into this smile of self-satisfied idiocy

XXXII

oh wished-for cramp with swing music and plundering hands

and love breast to breast and the ether mask’s hiss

you rival of invalids the dance of death’s small revelry

with horrors in advance and simplification’s bandage

you trampler of fabrics with hymns of high heels

and nothing that manages to gain meaning or conclusion

your surprise only gives us the same familiar

spirit of homelessness that visits our magnet

and seduction gives death and space a moonlight solo

blue mantles of crystal that maybe provide coolness

to the leaves’ green meshes where the caught eye stares

at the fall of the scales of flesh from the clay of empty hands

when naked to the waist we trespass

in the river of death and the packed halls of pain

XXXIII

the invisible one within us tears apart all space

and all race-tracks become part of the measurable nothing

and the seconds turn to stone and the perspectives run

into the suns of cruelty with the shadows’ thirsting dwarfs

that cut into their leather flesh to give their skeletons air

and surrender the event to breaking-point’s rollers

until the vision invokes the darkness of the jagged peaks

from the armchair of eternal rest: a denying continent

that on a shield of sun and madness raises its reflection

in an advantageous moment for our eternal blindness

that rocks the parasite of sinking down on the barrel-organ’s waves

and writes in mockery on the jealous rock of the future:

embalm the galley slave’s worn-out oars in the hall of amazement

embalm the sublimation and the tragedian in slow-motion

XXXIV

among the corals’ stiff mouth and whole-hearted dissension

among the murderers’ breathing that shrouds everything in mist

among the lies that pierce through the eye of truth

till it stares more stiffly than that of the one lashed to death

among the moments that glide along the tracks of torture

and disappear with a jerk into the hollow passage of the unreal

oh silence of black tears in poisoned prison towers

with the nightmare’s smelting furnace for captives’ magma-torment

oh blown-off hand and the parched recitative of death

in a golden coffer for withered leaves and revolutions

oh confused voice from the string of the broken bow

do not flee with your echo into the protected nook of the future

but decipher instead the illegible writing: capture the swishing

fall of the hammer towards a fate that as yet was not yours

XXXV

after wandering through death’s tunnels it was time

for hope to drive us to a new despair

we felt how we moved in a machine’s greasy air

in a despised acrobat and the eternally human

inside the navel there gleamed a chromium-plated tragedy

and an onlooker rocked in the false rope of the curtain

a prompter stood bending over the old chasm

so at to synchronise the beat of fate with reality

but we felt how the disclosure always keeps us waiting

until it is too late and the tears have already fallen

how the heart always rejoices too early and slips

on the stage cluttered with watered choirs

how the intrigue collapses but the tension remains

until a new walk begins for that most destroyed

XXXVI

the song burns and I wipe the red gleam from my forehead

hope is crushed and falls in the sea from wrongly dated towers

my sole fate longs for its star

but no beams are let through memory’s sudarium

in this mist where the victims drift aimlessly in their circles

where no one walks flashes from the clouds but where I see

how the cry of distress does not even leave a speck of dust behind

in this deep furrow torn open by at any rate somebody’s tears

and tired of the vanquished heart always having to pay

with an unconscious forgery for once more wanting to live

but still with dreams to be scoured clean in another water

like the roots of the biggest trees reach down to water

that can long murmur of centuries of water-life in the soughing

of springs where the depths finally vanquish themselves

XXXVII

gasping in our own net our impotence explodes

and the consuming lover’s hatred of himself

disguised as an abyss our fate rises up

prepared for something more than the harbour of destruction

reluctantly the torso frees itself from night’s stranglehold

forced by darkness to unbelievingly recall the light

over the dull eyes spreads the mist of humility

and the many ready travellers must wait for better visibility

dissolved into truth the dust of immortality sticks

fast to the bumblebee abdomen of denying illusions

the pierced zenith embraces the flutes of a shadow

here in bleeding outer space glides the rain’s whisper

that birth now awaits us at the ford of the seeing stones

that out in the water someone stands shoulder to shoulder with god

XXXVIII

I dream of the memory of the hind’s hoof in the maze

as the word of one spared to the one who has saved his life

of mirrors and running water like smoke of eternity

like faith stacked on faith in misery’s removal-load

of everything that has been repeated and grown into unreality

of the red lips’ song of that loved and missed

oh memory: oh fury and god that melts everything

down to nothing and hunts the tangible to death

tell someone if perhaps the days’ feet are moving forwards

on the drum of truth with a dawn for us

tell the wind whirling between the gates of the horizon

seeking its position between hovering and gravity

tell the wanderer travelling yet deeper into the world

seeking his talisman of darkness and light

XXXIX

not you retreat that always beg for yourself the gift of coherence

when the violin follows its orbit round the heart’s dark planet

that turns its face towards us silvered with strains of sound

that turns its face away from us to the struggle in the dark

to you my chaos my gleaming home that I bless

and hate or indifferently assimilate in the smile’s currents

that pours its well into my eye where I roam the earth

ready to travel and ready to stay: weighing death

in my hand and life in my love and with the mountain of faith

before me like a staff with no shepherd planted in god

while the guillotine in the blue heart of the blue twilight

separates my body from the desolately drifting clouds

so that I force the dark into a long and liberating embrace

attain the happiness that is dictated by everything and nothing

XL

and the one who understands nothing shall remember nothing

of a time that adorns its wounds with tablets of copper

but the one who stays shall not take root without memory

and three heavy steps in the empty ravine where the vulture

now broods on stone upon stone in blood’s heavy building

and the one who journeys shall have no other aim

than to discover the star waiting to be discovered

the star of the new creation that but few have glimpsed

yet to whom I dedicate this our truth before death

this rat-trap’s abyss and the long hour of waiting

this artificial calm that time has branded on my forehead

this splintered faith whose shards will yet moulder and grow

into future’s dream and the hind’s dream in the maze

and the word of one spared to the one who has saved his life