Victor Vroomkoning: 'Missen'

 

MISSEN

 

Dat je het soms mist

is het laatste wat je haar

zult toevertrouwen.

Het is niet uit te leggen:

een hengst die zijn hals over

de nek van een merrie legt.

 

Missen is zonde van jezelf

hoor je haar zeggen.

 

Dat je haar soms mist

is het eerste wat je haar

verzwijgen zult: een hengst

doodstil achter schrikdraad,

zin hals leeg, zijn ogen vol

van die naast hem in de wei stond.

 

Missen is bewaren

wat je mist.

 

 

MISSING

 

That you sometimes miss it

is the last thing you would

confide in her.

It cannot be explained:

a stallion that lays its throat

over the neck of a mare.

 

Missing is wasting your time

you hear her say.

 

That you sometimes miss her

is the first thing you would

keep from her: a stallion

stock-still behind electric fencing,

its throat empty, its eyes full

of what stood next to him in the meadow.

 

Missing is retaining

what you miss.

A photograph (Hans Bol) and poem (Victor Vroomkoning) from a beautiful book 'Het formaat van Waterland'. For more information, go to here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Klaus Høeck: 'Passport' (p. 252)

 

     and life ceases one

fine day and death ceases at

     the very selfsame

 

     instant (cannot be

repeated one more time) and

     eternity be

 

     gins once more from the

beginning in the hall of

     mirrors it is that

 

     simple – just call it

banal – that won’t alter the

     fact in the slightest

 

 

ZKG31: 'farewell'

 

farewell

 

the night after eddie died

it too stopped breathing

altered its modus moriendi

went endless

went viral

Lars Gustafsson: 'The machines' (essay about the poem 'Maskinerna')

Grandville: 'Le royaume des marionnettes'

 

To see the poem, go to here.

THE MACHINES

 

My poem ‘The machines’ contains an obvious paradox, one which I feel calls for a comment.

In order more easily to gain insight into what constitutes this paradox, we must begin by clearing away certain more trivial details.

Most people are well aware that ‘Heron’s steam ball’ is an antique precursor of the steam turbine attributed to Heron, that ‘the Voltaic pile’ is an ancestor of the modern electric wet battery, and that ‘the ballista’ is a primitive form of artillery, a huge stone launcher.

That ‘the great pit winder’ is one of the inventions constructed by Christopher Polhem for the large copper mine in Falun is perhaps less known.

The great pit winder was a huge haulage and elevating device for ore, powered by water and almost entirely made of wood. It is one of those 18th century machines that somehow seems to be much more mechanical than any modern machine, since the transmission of power in these machines took place with the aid of cumbersome and complex systems of rods that moved back and forth. The actual winder has long since crumbled away and only a ruin of the huge machine remains. But at the Museum of Technology in Stockholm Polhem’s own model of the machine can be seen. It offers an indescribable impression of its jerky, complicated, inexorable movement.

The ‘pneumatic winnower’ is a curiosity, taken from an old manual of physics, while ‘Una macchina per riscalare i piedi’ is a memory of the time when mechanical inventions almost seemed to hang in the air and were incorporated into royal cabinets of curiosities. During the Renaissance, a machine was either a curiosity, a topic of conversation, regarded and admired by breathless visitors, or some small, ingenious device that can increase the comfort of a fine gentleman when sitting in his armchair.

One could say that mechanics had not get been incorporated into experience and external conditions and still had a dubious independent status, more related to art or sleight of hand.

And finally ‘the flat-rod system’ is the type of power transmission device that must once have dominated the areas around a mine, the 18th century precursor of today’s high-voltage power lines: from loom-like devices on water-wheels motion is transferred to a system of alternately forward- and backward-moving rods. Such a flat-rod system, placed on quite high poles, could run for miles through the terrain, and ingenious cross-overs enabled the rods to shift at a right angle to their normal direction.

As you can see, I have avoided including in my poem’s inventory any machine from my own time, and that has been done deliberately: what interests me in this poem is more the mechanical aspect of the machines themselves, the machine-likeness of their appearance than their various functions, and this indeterminate characteristic we can practically only discern in machines that in some way or other have become curious and antiquated, that have ended up outside everyday contexts and therefore, to use the poem’s formulation, are ‘homeless’.

 

That a poem deals with machines is of course nothing remarkable. At a guess, I would assume that the oldest mechanical device that has provided images for literature is the loom – or perhaps the millstone? Ever since Tennyson’s age, machines have featured ever more frequently in poetry. The emotional states or experiences that they have contributed to it have been of a very disparate nature: from wide-eyed astonishment or perhaps – as with the futurists, a kind of intoxicant, to homeless despair. There are not merely one but many literary traditions that build on the expressiveness of machines.

The Romantic enthusiasm that certain poets could feel for machines in the infancy of industrialism is not our focus in this context, nor is the ecstatic attitude of the futurists or the realistic pathos of the early Soviet poets with regard to the machine.

What interests me is a completely different emotional state, one that is hard to describe and without a doubt fascinating. It is to be found in some of the drawings of Grandville’s ‘Un autre monde’, where caricature-like renditions of machine elements, steam whistles and cast-iron details assume human form and live on in a burlesque existence which is both petit bourgeois in the manner of a children’s tale and fantastic in the same way that surrealist artworks are. It is to be found in the strange, meticulous and excessively complex descriptions of machines that fill page after page in Raymond Roussell’s strange novels, and also, this time with scary and crystal clarity in Franz Kafka’s novella ‘In der Strafkolonie’, where precisely the account of the immoderately complex machine that is an instrument of torture forms the secret core of the story.

And one can perhaps get something of the same feeling when viewing Marcel Duchamp’s glass painting ‘La Mariée, mise à nu par ses célibataires mêmes’, this peculiar work of art that has captivated so many changing interpreters and where the machine aspect with the strangest of names seems to be involved in some complicated and apparently meaningful, but also incomprehensible, process.

All these artworks deserve thorough explications – the differences between them are at least as great and interesting as the similarities. But let us content ourselves with stating that all of them contribute to narrowing down the special experience of the machine-like.

The machines of Kafka, Duchamp, Roussell as well as Grandville all convey, to various degrees, an experience of something secretive, hard-to-grasp and terrifying about the machine. One could say that they are reactions to the machine-likeness of the machines.

All of us are familiar with this feeling, just as we are familiar with symbolism where the predictably repeated movements of the machine are contrasted with the unpredictability of organic life, its fertile unreliability.

We feel uneasy about the machine in the same way as we feel uneasy about a phantom: something which has no life and which moves nevertheless – it simulates life. When he contrasts the mechanical movements of the machine with the mobility of organic life it is not in order to exploit the machine as a death symbol – it is not death that it means, rather the possibility that our own lives are simulated in the same way.

There is something – call it alienation, describe it in Marx’s or Kierkegaard’s terms or however you like – some experience which all of us have in common – that we are actually marionettes, mechanical dolls, homunculi, and then to ask the question: What difference does that make?

La Mettrie – as far as I know – was the first person to explicitly ask the question and something during the last century has made it relevant with extraordinary force, with a suspicion also becoming widespread.

This experience has been crucial, also when my poem has come into being. The paradox of the poem is that this experience during the work has come to be combined with another one, so that it can look as if I, in a paradoxical way, was seeking security precisely in the experience, while others have only sensed a disorientation, a mystification, or nothing less than dread.

 

To compare language with the behaviour of machines and to affirm that grammar is a machine may seem to be a far-fetched allegory.

I believe that it would never have become of real interest to me if I had not become acquainted with various new modes of thought within linguistics, such as those concerned with the concept of ‘grammatical structure’ and similar concepts. It is especially the attempts of Noam Chomsky to define the grammatical sentence with the aid of a number of elementary operations that came to my mind.

With regard to the thoughts that it uses to communicate information, grammar seems to possess an almost secretive objectivity: its forms lend themselves to everything and at the same time they have an aura of something objective, extra-human independence about them.

It is not without good reason that Chomsky in his work ‘Syntactic Structures’ has characterised grammar as a machine. It is the machine which out of the multiplicity of theoretically possible word-combinations, jingles,  sequences selects precisely those which constitute organised, comprehensible language.

Once one has familiarised oneself with this idea, it is difficult to free oneself from it: there is something mechanical about our words and our utterances – something impersonal one might almost say, as if we ourselves were not producing the thoughts but that language was thinking within us, and we only were lending a voice to a larger and more immense linguistic structure that grows through us like the mycelium of a parasitic species of fungus penetrates its host. Or perhaps as if language was a huge, invisible mechanical process.

Practically no human being exists who has not at least as some time experienced the paradoxical independence with which words live and think in us, and how this objectivity of language links us to strange, distant and half-forgotten thought, to historical events long past, to attitudes that are alien to us.

There is, if you like, also an experience of the logical, of the mysterious in the fact that every sentence we utter has an infinite and ungraspable set of statements as a consequence, no matter whether we understand it or not, whether we wish it or not. 

It could also be described as an experience of mathematics: of the obstinacy of natural speech; that once they have been defined, they do not lend themselves to any purposes whatsoever, but only undergo the transformations and combinations that it is in their nature to undergo.

Their nature? Yes, more theirs than ours.

There is, then, an experience of an alien, impersonal, ungraspable diversity in which we are most deeply involved. It is just as reasonable to say that it which thinks with us as to claim that we think with it.

 

Modern cybernetics has convincingly shown that a whole series of traits which we have regarded as being exclusive for the human thought process can be simulated by mechanical devices. Memory, the capacity to reach conclusions, and to make rational choices on the basis of given suppositions. In discussions about modern mathematical machines and their analogy with human beings one sometimes hears the argument ‘that the machine is incapable of imaginativeness’. As far as I understand it, there is nothing in principle to prevent the construction of a machine where each ongoing operation is capable of giving rise to similar but not identical operations that are not grounded in logic, i.e. to associate.

Some of my readers may possibly suspect me of wanting to develop some kind of deterministic or mechanistic philosophy. That would be meaningless for my purpose.

I am only interested in collecting some cues so as to point in a certain direction.

Anyone examining a cybernetic device sees no thoughts, he only distinguishes between parts of a machine. To assign life to them would be a form of animism. Anyone looking inside a human being does not see any thoughts either.

But when a human being looks inside himself, he experiences himself as a consciousness. Is that perhaps a form of animism too?

The symbolic value of the machines lies in the fact that they remind us of the possibility that our own lives are in some way simulated in the same sense as the machine simulates life.

My poem deals with the possibility of perceiving ourselves as machines or as cybernetic devices programmed by our own language and our own logic. It is an attempt to change the perspective, to construct a new aspect of the best-known thing of everything:

 

The picture swarms with people. Human beings,

tiny as flies, are being hoisted and lowered in barrels

and the object marked ‘j’ in the picture, ‘La Grande Machine’,

at the fresh waterfall, drives all the cables.

 

The history of philosophy is full of arguments that seek to prove that I do not have any access – any direct access, that is – to other people’s inner lives, i.e. that all humans apart from myself could very well be marionettes. There are much fewer arguments which seek to prove that I could be a marionette without ever discovering it.

If other people’s mental life really was inaccessible in the sense that certain philosophers claim, it would also have considerable linguistic consequences. It would mean that each and every word of mine, e.g. ‘apple’ or ‘red’ had two meanings, a public one, accessible to everyone, and a private one, only accessible to myself.

I do not know how many aesthetic and poetical doctrines regarding the ‘imperfection of language’ as a linguistic wall that separates one person from another are based on such a point of view. And the question is whether or not this doctrine of ‘the anti-poetical wall’ is one of the most important sources of poetical purism that is one of the roots of all lyrical modernism. The idea that the words separately or in every conceivable combination hide or conceal a residue of experience that can never be ‘communicated’ increasingly appears to be the leftover of an untenable metaphysical approach, one that still remains to be overcome.

As far as I am concerned, everything is said by what is said, and I regard language as being completely transparent: it completely expresses our thoughts. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein advances in his ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen’: if language was such that in principle it was unintelligible to anyone else, then it principle it would also be unintelligible to me as the speaker as well.

There are no linguistic walls: every experience is present (clearly or unclearly formulated) here and now and exhaustively in the formulation I give to it. There is no inaccessible residue behind our words; there are no private meanings. Language exhausts us. It is the impersonal within us and like objective media our thoughts exist. Thinking is within us.

Such a way of looking at things must lead to a different poetic than that of classical modernism.

The poem ‘The machines’ can be regarded as a modest fragment of such a poetic.

My poem assumes that a form of community has been established once and for all, and that its innermost being is something impersonal. And it seeks solace in this fact.

It is, if you like, a community among marionettes that simulate life, but the condition for it would seem to be that we rub the metaphysical sleep out of our eyes and see it. A strange community – deep within mechanics, and yet a community, confidentiality.

From this point of view, the tragic thing about humanity is not that it is shut out, that something separates it from life. nor that its words do not reach their destination.

The tragic thing about humanity, as also about machines, is that it does not have any secrets.

 

Lars Gustafsson: 'Beskrifning öfver Norbergs bergslag'

 

BESKRIFNING ÖFVER NORBERGS BERGSLAG

 

De mycket mörka vattnen kommer mycket långsamt

ut ur skogen och har en besk smak

 

Jättelika svarta kräftor rör sig vacklande

över stenar och stenar, mitt över strömmen

 

svävar en stare, och det är tusen år

för tidigt eller tusen år för sent.

 

Svarta vattenfyllda gruvhål i avlägsna kullar

sträcker sig djupare ned än kyrkornas torn

 

och trevar efter något

 

Jättelikt järnbeslaget trä murknar

under en grönska som är alltför tät:

 

hallon och ormar

 

De medeltida bergsmännens hackor sitter fast i träden

 

Hela trakten väntar

 

Snart skall det börja igen

 

 

DESCRIPTION OF THE NORBERG MINING DISTRICT

 

The very black waters come very slowly

out of the forest and have an acrid taste

 

Gigantic black crayfish lurch uncertainly

over stones and stones, midway above the river

 

a starling hovers, and it is a thousand years

too early or a thousand years too late.

 

Black, inundated pits in distant hills

stretch farther down than the towers of churches

 

groping for something

 

Gigantic iron-encrusted wood decays

beneath verdure that is far too dense:

 

raspberries and snakes

 

The mattocks of medieval miners are still stuck in the trees

 

The whole region is waiting

 

Soon it will begin again

 

Klaus Høeck: 'Password', p. 116

 

     i look at myself

in the mirror – i see that

     i look at myself

 

     and realise there

by that i’ve never seen my

     self that no one has

 

     ever seen himself

or herself except as a

     mirror image

 

     since the eye can’t see

itself can’t see anything

     else than the mirror

 

 

zkg 30: 'classified like insects'

 

‘classified like insects’

 

persecution of all unlike oneself

(‘hetzjagd’ to use a less ‘latin’ word)

typifies many forms of nationalism

nothing to do with love of one’s country

everything with hatred of those outside it

and a fear of being inferior

that is palpable proof one's precisely that

Marie Dauguet: 'Les forêts'

 

Les forêts

 

Les forêts sont pleines de sons

Ténus comme des fils d’argent,

Sons d’imperceptibles chansons

Sur un invisible instrument;

 

Voile de tremblante dentelle,

Le silence en est tapissé,

Le bleu des sous-bois traversé,

Le bord des sources en ruisselle.

 

Les forêts sont pleines de son,

D’une telle fragilité,

Que c’est du cristal en chanson,

Ou des parfums ébruités...

 

C’est plus mince et plus doux encor

Que, berçant l’été qui s’endort,

Le concert vaguement tinté

Des grillons au sistre argenté.

 

Plus souple que les bémols tendres,

Aux trois flexions veloutées,

Des crapauds aux mares des landres

Par le clair de lune envoûtées.

 

C’est le mourant soupir qui rôde,

Sous l’arceau, d'un rayon chromé,

Ou la verrière d’émeraude,

D’un orgue au clavier refermé.

 

C’est un arc au ciel suspendu

Sous la brume qui l’emprisonne;

Furtif, un baiser défendu,

Où l’âme en sourdine se donne.

 

 

The forests

 

The forests are with sounds quite stirred,

Fine-spun as silver filament,

The sounds of songs, though scarcely heard,

Played on an unseen instrument;

 

A gauze-thin veil of trembling lace

That drapes the silence there anew,

That spreads across the brushwood’s blue,

And leaves round trickling springs its trace.

 

The forests are with sounds quite stirred

That are of such fragility

They’re songs of crystal scarcely heard,

Or scents escaping secretly...

 

It’s fainter, gentler, though close by,

And forms a summer’s lullaby,

This silver sistrum concert played

By unseen crickets in the shade.

 

More pliant than the gentle tones,

A velvet-smooth arpeggio,

Which toads croak from the fens of landres,

Bewitched in moonlight’s eerie glow.

 

It’s the far-roaming, dying sigh

Beneath the arch of some chromed ray,

Or emerald-hued canopy

Of organ keyboards shut away.

 

It’s a dim rainbow that hangs low

Beneath the mist which hides and seals;

Furtive, a kiss that none may know

To which the muted soul now yields.

 

Queen Sophie's Song Book no. 45 (The klaffer the de er saa mange thill)

 

The oldest Danish folk song tradition

 

Manuscript: Queen Sophie’s Song Book

Number: 45

Page: 243

Title: (The klaffer the de er saa mange thill)

 

See original here

(also in modern Danish)

 

 

 

Of slanderers countless do exist

as sand on the sea bed lying;

may God in Heaven punish those

whose false tongues cause grave sighing.

 

there’s no one alive I dare believe

of male or of female gender;

for I have suffered such deceit,

and so these words I tender.

 

know well, I you advise, the one

to whom you swear allegiance;

so many their vows fail to keep at all –

’gainst one such I harbour this grievance

 

there’s no one alive I dare believe

who ever could inform me

that such deceit in you resides

whose forked tongue spoke so warmly.

 

I think I will let things lie now,

there is nothing more to be stated;

your faithless heart is so well known

that to be despised you are fated. 

 

 

ZKG29: 'The end-game'

 the end-game

 

no yearning can create a loving god

a loving god would not so botch creation

unless he was a weird sadistic sod

that got a kick from pain and laceration

 

a kinder view is simply he got bored

and buggered off once all was set in motion

instructions there were none so we were floored

since as a twist he’d tagged us with emotion

 

 

Lennart Sjögren: 'The pig' (1980)

Grisen

 

Här är grisen

Detta er grisens dikt.

 

Grisen över Europa och världen

mest tänker jag på grisen i Sverige.

 

När grisen föder och när den kommer ut i världen

när suggan som en kontinent av liv en natt föder.

De nyfödda som är gulligare än kattungar

de luktar choklad och kan duga som utvikningsblad

de luktar salt, ammoniak, ljummet socker, halm

de luktar sommar.

Sen stuvas de in i bilarna och kommer sig ut i världen                  

de är tidigt bestämda för världen.

 

När hon krystar och i natten klämmer fram de små

när hon är en mor lika god som någon annan

trynig ligger på sidan

och Sverige som dricker ur henne.

De små fjuniga, de små tungorna, de små näsborrarna

som skuttar omkring.

Om spädgrisens död

om födelserna som knappt hinner bli överståndna

om dödarna som knappt hinner vila sig.

 

Sverige som äter upp sig på grisen:

grisen, skjutmasken och det svenska välståndet

den svenska kulturen.

Grisodlingarna. Tulpanodlingarna.

 

Gris

du skära och användbara blomma i matvärlden.

 

Dürers teckning av grisen

det är den småväxta grisen, den kutryggiga,

den småvilda med långt borst. Det är en fast och

väl sluten gris, den ser så liten ut på bilden

så späd är den

men den är på väg att bära en värld på ryggen.

 

Grisen och dess död

grisen och sättet den lämnar världen

den offrar sig inte frivilligt

det är inte många som offrar sig frivilligt

de offras ändå.

Nu har den redan trynrepet på sig och är på väg

till skottet.

 

Den minoiska grisen t.ex.

gjuten som ett mindre monument i järn eller terrakotta.

Medelhavsgrisen

kom upp ur vattnet, klättrade på Kreta, försvann.

Ja, den ornamenterade grisen.

Och grisens vandring genom Europa

den fläckiga grisen, den senromanska, den medeltida

den franskt medeltida, den nordiska vintergrisen.

Den magra vildgrisen, furstejakterna, betarna

in mot den tämjda, den engelska och danska,

den späckiga. Först i vår tid den ekolodade

kundvänliga och fullt vetenskapliga.

Så som människan är så ock de lägre i hennes tjänst.

 

Grisen som den lägre

grisen som den sannare

grisen som man kan trivas med för att den är vad den är,

rätt fredlig är den

men bär sin aggressivitet, suggorna med de lömska betten

och de storvuxna fargaltarna

grisen redan som barn på väg till sin nedslaktelse

grisen på sin väg till kasslern

— därför tycker vi om den

för inget annat tycker vi om den.

Låt mig beskriva den döende grisen

som inte är den döende svanen.

 

Bondeslakterna, de tidiga morgnarna, skållvattnet

spjärnar bakåt, tänderna. Lock och pock, kommer fram

spretar, kommer i skottläge. Klubban, hålet i pannan.

Den smala pannan

de små pärlande ögonen, stickiga ögonen

mot vinterhimlens röda, det gälla skriket.

— Så fick du ändå dö i soluppgången.

Knäcks hop, kniven ledig in i strupen

det varma röda, borrar om, sörplar,

Livnär.

Skållas, tvättas, hårslits, klövslits

upphängd vit och naken.

O du nakna

du i morgonen svajande vita

så hänger du där, så över oss upphöjd

som till ett beläte upphöjd

En svan gungande i döden blev du ändå.

De springer runt dig, de har så bråttom

de skär upp dig, de tvättar dig, de avskiljer dina delar.

Äter dig.

 

Du kniper ögonen inför det som bländade i döden

du vajar där

och är nu mittpunkten i en universell rit —

det är inte många som tänker på, men nu delar du

ditt liv med våra liv

med bakbenen uppsträckta snuddar du nu

det himmelska.

 

Så är du också en faktor att räkna med

i svensk livsmedelshantering idag

du har din del i

sommarstugebyggandet och småbåtsägandet

fyraveckorsbadet, husvagnen och det tunna välståndet.

 

Den ätliga grisen

den gris som uppehåller världen

de lägre kasterna

den kast som uppehåller världen.

 

Jag såg ditt itukluvna huvud

tandraderna, den lilla hjärnklumpen, tuggtänderna

kindtänderna, det röd-vit-gula

näsgångarna, det flisiga, bladrika, det utstuderat

kryptiska. Katakomberna, fördämningarna.

Ditt universum i ditt huvud

som följer mig genom livet.

Ditt huvud och människans huvud, det är olika huvuden

fiskhuvud, fågelhuvud.

Din tunga (som är en delikatess), ögonen,

det kluvna trynet och de nerskurna öronen, snäckorna

därinne. Kindmusklerna. Strupvägen.

Och blykulan som låg så oskyldigt klar

mitt inne i hjärnan.

Jag ställde upp det framför mig och jämförde dig med

stjärngatorna

jämförelsen utföll till din fördel. Jag skulpterade dig

så som man i drömmar skulpterar

och du övertäckte världen.

 

The pig

 

Here is the pig

This is the pig’s poem.

 

The pig throughout Europe and the world

I’m mostly thinking about the pig in Sweden.

 

At the pig’s birth and when it enters the world

when the sow, like a continent of life, gives birth one night.

The new-born babies , that are cuter even than kittens,

they smell of chocolate and could serve as pin-ups

they smell of salt, ammonia, lukewarm sugar, straw

they smell of summer.

Then they are crammed into cars and enter the world

they are destined for the world early on.

 

When she bears down and, at night, squeezes out her young

when she is as good a mother as anyone else

when she snoutishly lies on her side 

and Sweden that drinks from her.

The small downy creatures, the small tongues the small nostrils

that frolic about.

About the piglet’s death

about the births that have scarcely been completed

about the deaths that scarcely have time to rest.

 

Sweden that fattens itself on the pig:

the pig, the shooting-mask and Swedish prosperity

Swedish culture.

Pig cultivation. Tulip cultivation.

 

Pig

you pink, versatile flower in the world of food.

 

Dürer’s drawing of the pig

it is the small pig, the hump-backed

the small wild variety with a long chest. It is a firm and

trimly formed pig, it looks so small in the picture

it is so young

but on the way to bearing a world on its back.

 

The pig and its death

the pig and the way it leaves the world

it does not sacrifice itself voluntarily

they are sacrificed even so.

Now it already wears the snout-rope and is on its way

to the parting shot.

 

The Minoan pig, for example

moulded like a small-sized monument in iron or terracotta.

The Mediterranean pig

came up out of the water, clambered around Crete, disappeared.

And the pig’s migration through Europe

the spotted pig, the late-Roman, the medieval

the French medieval, the Nordic winter pig.

The scrawny wild pig, the royal hunts, the tusks

the shift towards the tame pig, the English and Danish,

the full-fat pig. Not until our age the eco-loaded

customer-friendly and fully scientific.

Like the human race the lower animals are also in her service.

 

The pig as the lower

the pig as the truer

the pig one can get on fine with for being what it is,

it is quite peaceable

but carries its aggressiveness, the sows with their deceitful bites

and the massive wild boars

the pig already as an infant on its way to its slaughter

the pig on its way to smoked saddle of pork –

that is why we fancy it

for nothing else do we fancy it.

Let me describe the dying pig

which is not the dying swan.

 

The farmer slaughterers, the early mornings, the scalding water

braces backwards, the teeth. Coaxing and urging, comes forward

struggles, comes into firing position. The club, hole in the forehead.

The narrow forehead

the small, beady eyes, the prickly eyes

against the red of the winter sky, the shrill scream.

– so you even got to die at sunrise.

Collapses, the knife easily slips into the throat,

the warm redness, twists around, slurps,

feeds.

Is scalded, washed, dehaired, cloven in two

hung up white and naked.

Oh naked one

you swaying white in the morning

there you hang, raised above us

raised like a graven image

You became a swan swaying in death even so.

They leap around you, in such of a hurry

they cut you up, they wash you, separate your parts.

Eat you.

 

You narrow your eyes at this as if dazzled in death

you sway there

and now are the centre of a universal rite –

there are not many who consider the fact that you

are now sharing your life with our lives

with you hind legs upstretched you now lightly graze

the divine.

 

So you also are a factor to be reckoned with

in today’s handling of foodstuffs in Sweden

You have your part in the building

of summer cottages and ownership of small boats

the monthly bath, the caravan and the frail prosperity.

 

The edible pig

the pig that upholds the world

the lower castes

the caste that upholds the world.

 

I saw your cleft skull

the rows of teeth, the small clump of brain, the incisors

the molars, the red-white-yellow

nostrils, the splintered, leafy, the studiedly

cryptical. The catacombs, the dams.

Your universe in your head

that follows me through life.

Your head and a human head, there are different heads

a fish head, a bird’s head.

Your tongue (which is a delicacy), eyes,

the split snout and the cut-down ears, the whorls

within. The cheek muscles. The pharynx.

And the lead bullet that lay so innocently clear

in the centre of your brain.

I raised it up in front of me and compared it with

the avenues of the stars

the outcome was in your favour. I sculpted you

as one sculpts in one’s dreams

and you covered the entire earth.