Henrik Nordbrandt: 'Sea Dragon' - Part IV

IV

LOVE SONNET

I declare this poem to be a sonnet:

Firstly, because it has fourteen lines.

Secondly, because it will prove

already in the first line to have heralded

a surprise: Namely, thirdly,

because one will unable to get

any meaning out of it before I myself

have found it: Fourthly all of this

will first and foremost deal with the one and only

for such a person no longer exists: And how liberating

to be able to talk like this about the one and only.

The one and only has left me, and I am too old

to find a new one. Sixthly and seventhly I’m talking nonsense.

Find a new one! There is only the one and only.

So this turned out to be a sonnet with fifteen lines.

SLEEPING AROUND

I love to sleep around

in strange rooms

with strange women

to hear the rain on the roof

and hear the banana plant rustle against the gutter

and hear the water pipes gurgle

and a radio start up in the room next door.

I love to hear a woman

burst into a lament in a strange language.

I love strangeness:

The one room more strange than the other

the one woman more strange than the other

the roar of the tiger in the courtyard beneath the moon.

I love being in love

in one particular person

and I listen to all these sounds

alone in the dark.

WISH

I wish I could see you as you were.

No! I wish I could see you

as I wish you were.

No! I only wish that you were

such that I could see you.

But right now you are too far away.

So most of all

I probably wish I wasn’t here at all

so it was only you.

And if I stare long enough out into the dusk

at the almond tree in blossom:

Then all these 

my conflicting wishes are fulfilled

at one and the same time!

FATHER, MOTHER AND CHILD

Just say it as it is, she said.

So I do just that:

I don’t know who first turned

their back on the other

but I can just as little forget your back

as my own childhood.

You ascribed to me

your worst attributes

as I also ascribed to you

quite a few of mine.

Sometimes you became my mother.

At other times I became your father.

That was how we played

father, mother and child

to the great benefit of the children.

No life was ever breathed into them.

So they were never laid in the earth either.

NATURE AND UNNATURE

Sex, many people claim, is a part of nature.

I believe the opposite, that nature must have blundered

and have become pure unnature when it invented sex.

‘I want to marry that!’ I said the first time

I saw a sea dragon. ‘And I mean right now!’

So I found a human as a replacement.

Judging by her grace, shape of nose and curve of back

she really did resemble a sea dragon.

And she often appeared in long, fluttering robes

in the open air, while she sang: ‘I am at one with nature.’

As far as sex is concerned: Well, let’s skip that!

For the same reason she fell in love with her psychiatrist.

I should have looked my own unnature in the eye

and stuck to the sea dragon behind the glass of the aquarium.

UNTRANSLATABLE

‘Kendimi hayalet gibi hissediyorum.’:

‘I feel as if I were a ghost’

here in my old boarding house room

in the Halikarnassos of Antiquity

with the roar of the disco of the same name in my ears.

And for the same reason the end comes

before the beginning: In the beginning was the translation.

That was before I have learnt the words.

The words that come last are the ones I like most

because it is them I understand least.

That’s what it’s like being a child. The word child is so abused.

That’s why I find myself saying it every time doubt seizes me.

It does that when I feel bored.

When I feel bored, I doubt that it’s me doing it.

There are so many other children who also want to be me.

They have learnt the translation by heart

but individually do not understand the words.

Not a hotchpotch at all. We’ll come to that in a moment.

That comes of being a ghost.

Purely personally I now think

unconceived is a better expression

for the being that surrounds us in this house.

And it’s precisely here

the word hotpotch intrudes.

They are already mixing several languages together

like when you stir an old-fashioned sooty pot.

So there is only the image left.

Somewhere or other in the image there’s much too much red

possibly because of everything there’s not any room for

the autumn gale for example, the garden’s purple figs

and the boats out in the blue bay

seen through the sunlit cobwebs behind the window panes

or perhaps because I have blood in my mouth.

I don’t care whether it’s yours or mine.

I love feeling like the ghost

whose mouth someone or other has returned to

in order to whisper declarations of love through

the chorus of the unconceived

when we lie mouth to mouth and caught

behind the cobwebs, in each other’s twisted limbs:

All the untranslatable.

BAFA GÖLÜ

Because you never left

you never came back either.

So when I walk around this lake

it is not because I believe I will meet you

or imagine to myself

that you hear what I say.

It is because of the stillness

that I have chosen precisely this lake

and because it is dark and deep.

The migrating birds change course and fly round it.

On its banks I only meet my own sodden tracks.

So get the hell out of here, dammit!

THE WHITE VASE

Summer has not gone yet

and you have not gone yet

and I have not gone yet.

And the door is shut

and the warm evening sun filters through the window panes

and the birch tree’s shadow brushes

the dust on the black table

with the white vase.

And the dust stays put.

JOY

Joy is like an hour-glass:

You want to turn it upside-down all the time

so as to make it last.

And that which runs down is sorrow.