II.
Fragment
Hörende at five o’clock in the morning.
Mist. Sound of a sea bird.
Afternoon and a cunning adder
disappears in the house foundation
The thunder increases as if it were a fact.
Hiding place in the homeland
Two birds above the burnt forest
Strange red-headed woman
Offered peewit’s eggs in a clearing
Curiously shaped key
handed over by a fairy in pink boots.
This small key can open your heart
I will keep it safe
And the large old trees
those that survived down by the shore
Breathe in the wind – they whisper:
“Is it the age of the key now?”
Delivery
Sleep –
spotless delivery van,
which with its desolate
punctuality
lets me out
at four o’clock
at the stop of the new night.
Old calendar in the window of the summer house
Calendars,
you faithless witnesses of time!
How little you are able to tell
Of plums that have lain
far too long in the grass
Of boiled crayfish, just
lifted out of the dill-scented water
Of winter’s first dry squall of snow
that polishes the country lane to glass
Of the clear-felled stretch where the wind once sang.
O Calendars,
you faithless witnesses of time!
How quietly
you settle yourselves
in some drawer only opened
with some effort, that’s seldom visited!
Only recently
you could give rise to dread and hope,
and agitated waiting
at bus stops and in waiting rooms.
And now are half-illegible lines
between pathetically worn-out covers
in the writing desk’s bottom drawer
along with a stick of sealing wax
from a long ago Christmas
and one of those discount coupons
that was never made use of –
Once so full of promises
Bookmark
Yellowed bookmark,
In the middle of an old novel,
Found behind another one.
Here Greta Carlson stopped
reading Christmas 1929
Just when the Count of Alba
had come onto the stage
and the honest gaoler
realised he had the key
to his son’s prison
Ramnäs railway community seen from the north
Nobody knows what year it is
Perhaps it is a year that has never existed
The road through the railway community
from north to south comprises the following:
Uno Hedlund’s Cycle Repairs
where you can also borrow the phone
The post office with the unhappy lady who
naturally does not cautiously steam open
the station master’s love letters
and read them with mild melancholy eyes
The district medical officer reserved and mulling
over the enigmas of the medieval plagues
in his white palace up there on the hill
The Coop where the yellow buses turn
and where you can even buy kerosene
important for philosophical studies
That is why Fichte and Hegel still
have a faint smell of lamp-kerosene about them
The railway station with Clark Gable as a guard
(‘in this job, let me tell you,
you stand – all the time – with one leg in prison’)
And the wonderful brass telegraph:
Trains out
The chemist’s burned down later
the lady there was surly. To turn up there
needing something was an insult
she never forgave. Actually.
After which a bridge over Kilbäcken
a bridge that didn’t mean much
Salholm’s Grocery, the private alternative,
where the ham in the cupboard was always green
and the cheeses sweated like the peat-diggers
who dug on the bog out to the west
In Grocer Salholm’s dense, luxuriant beard
there was always, while he served
the actually rather rare customers,
a lit cigarillo with the brand-name Tärnan
And yet he never caught fire
Here ends Ramnäs railway community
We’ll tell you about the Church Village some other time.
In praise of summer
This day consists purely of small occurrences
Water clatters in the empty bucket
A hawk passes but not for us.
The paint on the window sill has peeled more
Than recently.
And how quietly the wicker chairs seem to talk
to each other on the verandah
When everyone has gone inside from there.
When everyone has gone in for marinated herring
And the ice-chilled snaps
(O.P. Andersson’s brand,
a seventh chord that is dying away,
a souvenir from the days of
The late literary author Strindberg,
of black steamboat smoke and the clattering
of barrows with iron-clad wheels
against a jetty paved with light stones)
The logonaut
I have spent my life
ordering the letters of the alphabet
in various ways. Dealing and shuffling.
Into a reasonably long string:
a long ski-track across white expanses.
The alphabet in Sweden has twenty-eight letters,
And then the twenty-ninth
the empty letter between the words.
Which has no name.
Like Zero it has no value.
That is why it is irreplaceable.
Beneath the wonderful clouds
Eight-minute-old sunlight
celebrates its childhood here.
No. Not this one.
But some other
in past daylight.
Garden furniture is shaded
by an extremely old elm
where in the foliage a stubborn song thrush
presents it greetings.
Strawberries in a blue & white bowl
with a century-old crack
are borne out along
with an ice-chilled bottle of
Cederlunds Caloric.
A grandchild goes on and on about a ball.
The morning’s rain
is still hanging in the lilac’s branches.
A quietly pondering buff-tailed bumblebee
has shifted its
strangely pedantic activity
into something obscure and vague
that can only be seen
in glimpses under the garden table
and is searching for this and that there.
Here the amateur film ends.
Striated and short.
Stockholm street
Psychosynthesis company
Save our carpets!
Who lived here?
Here there once lived a theology student,
Johan Sixtus Grenholm
who hailed from Gryta Gård on the plains.
He went mad
from studying the Book of Enoch
Why precisely the Book of Enoch?
Draft of a religious memorandum
So God exists
if one is to believe theologians of earlier times
in a state of eternal bliss
and can therefore not be affected
by human suffering.
Now that’s a pity. Otherwise
he could have learnt something
particularly about his own activity.
It’s strange; every time
there has been an earthquake in China
the upper glass-window of the kitchen’s
antique grandfather clock swings open.
Seismic sympathy? An occult phenomenon?
Or one of those meaningless gestures
with which the world grimaces
at us,
a nasty, stupid little boy in a playground,
who has to mess with us at any price
so that we will
take notice of him.
This, and nothing else.
Out there in the wide open spaces
Out there in the wide open spaces
we meet no one.
No human creature
or whatever we are to call it,
will ever come and visit
another galaxy.
Let millions of years come and go,
win your wars gather in your harvests
but to stand somewhere
on an emerald-blue diamond surface
and think:
“it really feels
completely different
here, in this galaxy”
Nothing will come of it.
Lively snowfall over philosophers’ graves
A lively snowfall
falls like an ironic comment
over past philosophers’ graves
in what is practically
a continuous winter twilight.
One of them was a kind of market-crier
the second was a sway-pole artist
the third kept a look-out on street corners
That era is over now. Here this snowfall thickens.
And these pages lack writing.
Insomnia
Gravitation is the one great curse –
a never-intended deformation of space
caused by the disturbing presence of matter
Stillness reigns
in pure empty space that never sleeps.
Space, freed from matter,
the still space of the great insomnia
At the graveside of an actor
(Gun Arvidsson 1930-2004)
Berenice in the late 1970s
in Racine’s strange play:
The stage floor is a vast mirror
in which she, gracefully reclining
revels in her own beauty
Her naked legs scissor
back and forth.
In the rhythm of the alexandrines.
She sees her countenance
looking up from the mirror-world
and it looks mysterious,
as if she were seeing it
for the first time
It’s a long time ago now
Full of ambiguities
that age,
but in its forward sweep
this image survived
and rose from the stone.
I never saw her
on any other stage
than precisely this one
And my story has no ending
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