III.
The stamp collector
When I started primary school,
A quite terrifying building
Built of red brick around 1900
With never-ending corridors
And a desolately echoing hallway
that smelt of limestone and sweat,
one had to collect stamps;
otherwise one wasn’t normal.
They had to be removed from the letters
In lukewarm water and using pincers
To be laid on paper to dry.
They were also on sale at the paper shop.
Down on the corner.
With the grumpy old lady.
His Majesty the King of Denmark.
President Harding in USA,
a president everyone has forgotten,
the German dictator, the sinister one,
And others that claimed to cost
Millions of reichsmarks, strange
small landscapes from New Guinea and Mali.
And they were then to be pasted
into a special album with devilish
small pasting tabs that either
stuck to your thumb or not at all.
Even today I feel a sneaking unease
Every time I have anything to do with stamps
And I was never really normal.
From my sweaty youth
They weren’t easy.
Who’s ever claimed they should be easy?
Schoolmaster Eskilsson’s religion tests:
The cause of Charlemagne’s withdrawal
from the Schmalkaldic League ?
Well, he probably had his reasons.
Uppsala
For Dr Dagmar Lagerberg
Some held themselves close to power
Power lifted its heavy eyelids
And admitted them to the antechamber
Some sank ever deeper
amongst the books.
They listened with heads cocked
Some were seen again, after decades,
surprising and hopeful
mildly striving into the wind
in this actually impossible place.
Things with no home to call their own
We imagine a funnel
that narrows,
but does not stop narrowing
It diminishes towards nothing
but never reaches it
We turn it upside-down,
and allow it to widen
Neither of them are contained
in this wide expanse of world
Under an old Norberg house
Under the kitchen floor
a long-since vanished monastery
The dead monks that lie
under the kitchen floor,
Devout friends from the 13th century
When there was a monastery here
under my present kitchen floor.
They didn’t have that problem
They had other
Problems.
The question of what it is actually like
to arrive in hell
And that which is almost worse:
What may one and may one not
do in paradise?
Here it was wadmal and bark bread
and shoe soles of bark or birchbark
birches stood light in the spring
well at times they must surely stand light
the birch devils
I wonder:
If one happens to end up in hell,
how does one really know hell is where one’s ended up?
And not simply a corner
Of the everyday?
The doors, wide-open now
The old crofts up at the forest edge
died slowly;
Gnarp, Naddtorpet, Rulltorpet,
Byggetorp and the others
Even in the fifties one could open
sadly creaking doors ajar
and gaze at abandoned rooms
where the wallpaper hung in tatters
In a washing-up pile of still stainless steel
a cracked glass perhaps still lingered
or a rose-patterned plate.
Now the main country road goes
up to the threshold of
what was once a porch and in the shadows
what was once an apple tree can be made out.
In the dead forest
The mist dares venture
into the dead forest
As if it had always lived there
It ventures forwards
now that no one can
surprise it any more
The black-scorched stones
have nothing to say
Ravens that feel at home
In the dead landscape
Catch your scent
and glide in on soundless wings
to see if you are really alive
In the depths of night
There exists a state
between three and four,
when one is neither asleep nor awake
there,
if one remains
absolutely silent,
one can for a moment sense
what it would be like
not to be at all the person one is.
And not anybody else either.
The sense of loss for Väster Våla church forest
Björn Nilsson’s grave is still there.
Though so close to the great fire
I knew him well
and had expected precisely that.
Up at Märrsjön lake the boats,
now all made of plastic were reduced
to handy black balls.
All but one which had lain
badly looked after in the water.
Not unlike my dead friend.
In my lifetime there will be no
more walks over the ridge
to the fabulous Hörende lake.
But perhaps in someone else’s lifetime,
who will then recollect
that something or someone had claimed
that there once was
an old forest here
with completely different trees
But that was long ago.
Already.
The ravens
Not before night
But in the proximity of night
across motionless dark waters
the raucous greeting of the raven
that bore its shadow
over burnt fields
Square. Winter night.
Square between three and four
after snowfall.
This square wants nothing
and in this snow
no tracks are visible.
This square disturbs no one.
Self-portrait in sepia
Can also make out myself
in the old photo,
long-haired and probably pimply.
Did I know then
about those books?
No. No, probably not.
But who did then?
Probabilistically entangled
in the sea of possibilities
they waited like a shoal of mackerel
for a deep current to…
The boundary
To tell stories is to lie
For whatever you tell
you try and convince them
that an ending exists.
And yet true stories
never have an ending.
That is what makes them
stories.
Give me an ending,
a farthest boundary to the universe,
and if that cannot be offered
a world ingeniously folded in
on itself.
A knot in Hilbert space.
But that it just continues
and will do so for ever
far beyond all horizons,
is unbearable.
Ten hours’ time difference
(Safely arrived in The New World)
It ought to be the dead of night
the scariest night hour
when all demons inhabit the walls
and the hounds of the underworld howl,
but here it is only a peaceful afternoon.
The jacaranda is in blossom.
And out of the grey sea mist
figures disengage themselves
that do not belong there.
Ghost voices that belong to the night
night has invaded day
The old man with two dogs
not unlike an academic procession
ends up beneath the Jacaranda tree’s shadow
Completely inoffensive in its afternoon
yet a slightly menacing phantasm
since he is part of my wide-awake dream.
Morning down by Hörende lake
Out of the thick mist
the trees emerge
like a host of reproaches
Is grey a colour?
Believe you me!
This greyness
begins to look like an assertion
Solipsism
‘The fleeting moment’
The only thing that is real?
This idea, which appears
In the philosophers
under such high-sounding names
as presentism and the like,
has a somewhat creepy consequence
that people prefer to forget:
In this now, our only home,
the others have no place.
It leaves us more lonely
Than when we arrived there.
How so?
Well, naturally:
Even the most intimate contact,
even a kiss, say, takes time.
If the moment is the only
real thing that exists,
We have no place
Where we can meet
You are shadows, the others,
shadows from that which is past
and the shadows the future contains
Greyness
Get closer to the grey,
To see if you exist there.
Or possibly someone else does.
It is actually possible
that the grey only depends on
the distance.
Velvet folds of stone
Stone that wants to become velvet
falls in royal folds
in the baroque church’s sepulchral tablets
But does not quite convince
Stone can never become velvet
This glass will soon be empty
It did not contain
As one might believe
Wine or water
But time
How can a glass contain time?
From the Museum of Impossible Objects
The trumpet of infinity,
is funnel-shaped and narrows
down to infinity
but never reaches the bottom
The trumpet of infinity
thus proves
that we can imagine an object
which cannot possibly exist
The poem that Borges never wrote
‘You are seventy-nine.
So where was I
When you were twenty?’
After some hesitation I replied:
‘Where you have always been:
Neighbour to the endless row of prime numbers
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Cervantes’ Don Quixote
A part of the secret order of the universe
that knows no “now” or “then”
including
The poem that Borges never wrote.’
The empty house
When I’m not there
my room leads
a strange life
It is populated
When March has arrived
the sunlit surface reaches
in across the threadbare mat
The binoculars sleep in their case
A strange wish:
to see
what my rooms looks like
when I’m not looking
I dreamt a dream
about a thousand-page novel
It was much too heavy to write.
When I don’t visit my room
it is populated by sleepy winter flies
and negations
My own perhaps too
To someone who isn’t here
At the beginning of June
she sat for a while,
resting in her own music
on the white garden settee
under both the apple trees.
Now this settee solely remains.
I think of old books
that graphically describe
old Danish churches
buried in the sea,
Would-be-wise ancient sea maps
show their position at a depth of sixty metres.
Now that time has done its work.
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