Poems in English

JUST LISTEN

This one is about silence.

No, there’s never silence.

Just listen: ok, no wings lapping, no wind

scratching the surface, no aspen rustling.

Still, everything isn’t still.

You hear a nervous crackle,

a muffled blast of a motorcycle behind

the thick deciduous forest.

                         Is it just noise

in your inner cave, call it the soul, call it a tent

that gathers echoes from the ancestors

who put up fires on this rock

and saw an ominous sail approaching

from the open sea?

                                  This is the shoreline

where the Vikings disembarked. They must have

ripped away part of your soul when they left:

a piece of decrepit canvas floating,

a ragged tire on the waterline.

And yes, the silence prevails,

just for a second, the real thing:

                                                        a profound                   

                     vibration

as if the ground were part of space

that emanates circles, an enormous

dark soul with a new, lower pitch.

(Zoom)

First I leap over a ditch,

stride across the damp ground,

step into the coarse mist

the landscapes here are similes,

also the dim row of lights behind the fen

similes of an inner surge

that I´m trying to fathom: you see inside

when you look outside, stare at the radio masts,

crooked pines and satellites

and a hare leaps behind a tussock, but

who is the other and the third

who runs beside me

                               with dashing paws?

I run across a dry moor

straight into a thicket, I clear

off the twigs on my face, I run

to a cottage in the shade of the Yggdrasill,

an unusually tall spruce

I make the coffee, I cut the bread, I saw the boards,

I want to see the fireplace blaze into a long deep night

feel a firebrand in the soul, in the nerve, in the muscle,

in the heart, those words are similes around here

and I hope that that´s enough about me,

because now I am going to speak of something else

Ode to the horizon

Of course it escapes, when so much

       is hurled towards it, a whole blizzard,

even more: iron nails and tie knots,

      even they are desires and a most burning longing.

Maybe you won´t believe, but once I found it

      under the tarpaulin, when a muddy rain

             made me to seek shelter.

It smoldered and sparked, scorched the fingertips,

      it fled with a hissing sound like a snake,

            with a rainbow and a blood scratch in the skin.

But without it I cannot advance two steps,

      cannot get over the ditch to the open ground,

because it pulls, trails, whistles,

      lights up the torches,

            it tugs and puckers.

It is a magnet. A refuge. A retreat.

      No, it is a foam, and ebb and flow, a sluice,

      it filters the minerals and metals

      that circle in the organs and perform tricks.

You do know how it attracts,

      like a ravine, the vertigo of a dash,

      the roar of the rapids: how its suction

             just grows and grows. It is what doesn´t exist,

a thing we stare with sore eyes,

      the blind spot, the rasp when the film breaks,

it pulls the strings behind the scenery,

     it assigns us to the role of genius and jester,,

             pours a bucket of water to the neck,

and finally tears apart the curtains in front of the

       the night of the soul.

Ode to an office

I pulled open several doors,

I ran from desk to desk,

followed signs and instructions,

walked from corridor to corridor

– something like that I remember you telling me

felt thirst quenching my throat,

found a water machine but it was empty,

I stopped by a window to look

at a cityscape waxed by the sun or a fire serpent,

at a highway along which hundreds of thousands of cars

were heading somewhere from where

they could head back or onward,

the grass patches looked unnaturally green

behind the darkened glass,

I pushed forward, asked for advice

and received mountains of advice

which led me to more counters,

more doors and more potted cactuses.

I filled a couple of forms and left them

in the indicated service points,

considered enclosing a couple of banknotes

but didn´t know whom to address them to and when,

nobody gave me advice about that,

– I think that´s what you were telling us

when we were looking at stars years ago,

there was a blackout, and the candle burned out,

your voice kept on echoing in the walls

of the ten-store buildings, you poured

the last drop of pastis into your glass,

swallowed it coarsely before clearing off,

I remember that they didn't give you a visa, at the airport

they wanted an unreasonable amount of money,

you played the fool, just kept repeating

that now I don´t understand a thing,

and finally you were off without paying anything

neither in the office nor at the airport,

and when you arrived, the polar night had fallen,

you saw traces of a motor sled over an endless expanse

and a still contourless creature was creeping out of a cave.

Alpha or Omega?

How a poem is born I don´t know

it is like standing on the other shore

seeing the ash falling to the water

when the waves burst and hit all around

Inhalation and exhalation belong to it

it is like having to start from scratch all the time

from scratch of the times or from the end of thread

from inside the ball from the prehistory at the ocean

with a streetcar screeching in the ears when

you finally try to get an hour´s rest

no rules no guru no guiding principle

only a heap of straws the murmur of the shell

a choir of voices in the ears it is

a crossing of the paths and a ground trampled

with strange traces: combs cellophanes

cracker crumbs cracks crows caws and

perhaps a cellar though be careful now

it isn´t a pig that eats everything rather a sheepdog

that skillfully keeps its herd together and sometimes

runs wild in the highlands when the wind blows from northwest

but note I didn´t say stones they´re something I don´t understand

I just wonder about the boulders that the ice age left behind

grooves and fossiles constantly changing species

that creep over the built ground too

It is a game of cards without numbers a pile of jokers

that sometimes are valid and then again aren´t

so many times I have longed for a measure

for a meter a metal a certitude of the mangle

but I end up crawling in the marsh and moor

and milk and malt will be poured to my mold

and there´s only you and me and the garden

and the coin of the moon in the wetland growth

I run in a circle there turn stones around

and I see the same faces the same moneychangers

who now speed in their Porches across the desert

heading to the gold coast where the night rays hypnotize

the neural pathways there the poem is born

       like Zenon´s arrow

towards the sum of

everything:

a knight dashing by, pointing the lance

to those distant stars and a spirit walking on the water.

OFF-SEASON

You get off in a village.

The fall leaves rustle,

the river glistens,

a lone car raises dust.

If you could stop the time,

you´d do it this way.

And you do stop the time,

and it happens like this.

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