Henrik Nordbrandt: 'Sea Dragon' - Part V

V

BELLADONNA

(Written after an eye examination)

How long haven’t I seen it coming:

‘Sharpness of detail’ turns out

on closer inspection to have been a pipe-dream

so ‘resolution’ would be the word

that replaced the one quoted, if change were possible.

Which it isn’t.

Blindness makes everything so clear.

And in that way

I can be sure that she hasn’t been here:
There are too many conditions

that cannot be fulfilled.

Change conflicts with the nature of these lines

like Dante bringing up himself

long before anyone has thought of Homer.

But why

mention world literature when you can make your own

and furthermore as you grow old become more and more

sceptical about world literature?

Especially the part of it that rhymes.

Without rhyme the details would even so have been sharper

not to mention the view

from the large panorama window with the palm tree

and the pyramids in the background.

I too would have felt at home on the back of a camel.

I you consistently removed the word I

every time I was just about to use it

I would be a happy man, I think.

That’s why I long for the day

when I have forgotten to read and write.

So this blindness

isn’t all that bad at all really.

It looks like a moral instead of an ending.

So she might well have been here after all, don’t you think?

Yesterday she was Beatrice, today Maria, tomorrow maybe Giraffe.

I remain the same

and thus recall, because of the changeableness of everything,

less and less about myself.

GOAT

Unbelievable the way Picasso could look at a goat!

In actual fact

just outside his native town I saw 37 in a field of cauliflowers.

I counted them, you see.

When a cloud hid the sun, they turned yellow as sulphur.

They were much too busy

devouring cauliflower to notice that

or else sulphur-yellow goats was

a perfectly normal sight for them.

It wasn’t for me. That was why I had stopped up.

Outside the cloud’s shadow the landscape was ochre-coloured

brown and rust-red as always.

The cauliflowers were green-violet and almost

as big as the goats

that attacked them with something that looked like utter disdain.

They butted and guzzled at one and same time.

It looked like a battlefield where the cauliflowers

because of their superiority in numbers

were predestined to win.

I invented the colours to make it last longer.

I wished a chance for the goats

to finish eating before they were held fast

by the last stroke, the last sickening

blot of green-violet.

But they didn’t make it. Just look

at them standing here

their mouths full of cauliflower, sulphur-yellow

with lavender-blue udders.

THALASSA

I have painted a picture so one can see

that what it represents

is further away from it, the more it looks like

what it is.

And so I have painted it

in words.

Just look at how far away

you already are from the self you used to like

to compare with the sea

there where it reveals itself

between the spring foliage of the beech wood

with fishing stakes and gulls

when the milky-white evenings become longer

than it is possible for you

to penetrate with your consciousness.

Words deceive

exactly as colours to

and so I have said it

in colours.

For colours do not rhyme

with mullers or cullers

just as little as with Hüdavendigar

a street name

that is especially dear to me

because the same gulls hang out there.

Sea does not rhyme with filigree

even though the sea is filigree-amber right now

as the deer come into sight at the edge of the wood

but possibly with thalassa

Yes, far out

very, very far out with thalassa.

IN EXTREMADURA

In Extremadura people stand well apart from each other

and each of them with a cigarette in the mouth:

They see a long way, but have this in common

with pumpkins

that they have to have a lit candle in their heads

before it dawns on them.

On the other hand it is impressively beautiful

far, far away from the nearest telephone box

and in billions of sunflowers

between each of the lazy green rivers

that flow into the neighbouring country Portugal

where they used to wear

funny pointed hats

and have heaps of neatly stacked skulls

in their baroque churches.

The person who cannot see it quite clearly in the mind’s eye

has read so far in vain.

For this is how I want to write

the way I saw it

when I had written this.

FLY WEATHER

It must be me who’s caused this cloudy weather

for I am without shadow

or religion, and I only see what surrounds me.

Only something red would be a saving grace, rowan berries perhaps.

The red house by the lake has always been the archetype

I thought was nearest to me.

The woman at the door seems simply made for that door

and from the white rowing boat at the end of the jetty I caught

my first perch in a lake a couple of lakes down river.

Everything is there to receive me, but I pass right through it all

and into myself without being discovered.

If anyone has ever known me, they do not show it.

On the other hand I can then stand for hours under an open sky

and hear the words I am going to say

like a distant thunder that never gets any nearer.

For I love the violet there

where the sulphur-yellow runs down into the green earth.

If you replaced the sound of the word I

with the sound of a fly lying on its back on a window sill

you would get a more exact picture of the truth.

That is why I cannot become a Jew

a Christian or a Moslem

not even a Buddhist, even though I have tried.

My lack of shadow

causes cloudy weather, I want to get away from myself. Love me for that!

DELIVERANCE

I am so looking forward

to summer coming to an end!

And the wind singing

so distant woods draw near

and darkness coming early

and yellow marigolds gleaming

so sleepwalkers

can find their way down from rooftops and church towers

and I have forgotten who I was

and dance beneath a street lamp in the drizzle

along with the moths that ate my last suit of clothes.

HOW MY MOTHER OFFICIALLY OPENED AUTUMN

On the day she decided

was to the first in autumn

my mother counted the elephants.

That was a sort

of old custom she had.

There were four

but if you looked very carefully

there could just turn out to be five

or possibly only three, she said.

This characteristic

I have inherited from her.

As far as my father is concerned

I inherited the gold lighter

I myself had given him

along with his sword.

The elephants were yellow

with green and brown and red blotches

so they could get away from themselves

in the September forests

before the first gale ripped off the foliage.

Finally you heard the garden gate

shriek in the gale.

On the far side of the lake’s steel-grey water

it sounded as if the god of

the wild geese had spoken.

After which there was a long silence

which has really never properly been broken.

THOUGHTS CLOSE TO CHRISTMAS

As far as I can see, it must at some point be you

who has finally written this.

Since the end clearly comes first

that implies God, you’ll probably manage to interject.

For the ways of the Lord are unfathomable, they say.

But I say: There is no god outside 

the word God, and I really wish

Jesus had stuck to the word.

I find his miracles a bit tasteless.

I think I could have believed

if it hadn’t been for them.

Then I would now have been a Christian

and who knows? Possibly a general.

There have been Christian generals before me

in the exactly the same way as Lazarus

ended up dying anyway.

So why procrastinate?

Here in midwinter

the unfathomable ways are full of water

which in a wild dream of changing itself into ice

melts into the sun just before it disappears.

I’m not getting anywhere

but am ageing with time faster than time passes.

That stands to reason, you say.

It’s got to do with the fact that you wrote this a long time ago

so it’s soon Christmas, hurrah for that!

If God in that connection were to argue the point with me

I would plead the concept ‘poetic licence’

just as he is most welcome to do the same.

GANGRENE

It gets dark earlier

than I recalled.

Many windows push forward

but none reach.

The wind goes right through your clothes.

Your soul freezes to ice

without your body noticing.

The street corners

cut across the years.

You were a different child

than the one you thought

and the one who notices his wounds

has already bled to death.

Everyone stands

outside each other.

IN LATE DECEMBER

The days don’t get any shorter

and life doesn’t get any longer

and death doesn’t get any closer.

And nothing feels any farther away

than it has been written

by the shadow in this low sunlight.