Monday 14 October 2024

Lars Gustafsson: 'Etyder' (III)


 

                                            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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