SATURDAY March 16th - IDUN
IDA LINDE
[Excerpts from “Caron’s Subway”]
I sit down at the Central Station
having a beer and resting my aching back
Invisible to the people
who are not invisible to me
I see them travel along the rail
the predetermined world
within them
They travel along the suffering of others
how they always turn around
dispatching the other to Hades
In the night their faces dissolve in water
The fact that I love them does not overrule death
*
The gaze of the ones who know they have been murdered
*
I wish I had given the children my money
bought new shoes at the mall
for my feet to be warm
but the new ones also take in water
I stand at the platform
Styx spilling out from the rock
*
The Passenger’s song
There was no Eden
there was a swamp of tired thoughts
a woodpecker
All I set out to do
I could also do
in hopelessness
I decided on a tree
If you’re not looking in one direction
you’re looking in another
It took a while for the eye to adjust
My wish is for the tree to be cared for
by someone who needs it like I needed it
to prune the gaze
*
The people no longer live
with their habits in their windows
They could not pay the rent
A bare parking lot
still lingers
between the store and the station
*
In another community
In another forest
On another savanna
Along another rail
What would loss look like?
*
The Passenger’s song
I thought of my clinic
as a guerilla activity
Shifted the incentive of the patients into higher gear
as a way to put up with
the talk of their troubles
Now afterward I wonder
why I kept thinking about my work a
s a psychologist
I mean
when one can think anything at all
*
I close my eyes briefly
It is forbidden
But I want to be able to live in the lie
that we have all the time in the world
luljeta lleshanaku
old news
Old news
In the village nestled between two mountains
the news always arrives one month late,
cleansed in transit, glorified, mentioning only the dead who made
it to paradise,
and a coup d‘état referred to as 'God‘s will'.
Spring kills solitude with solitude, imagination
the sap that shields you from your body. Chestnut trees
awaken, drunken men
lean their cold shoulders against a wall.
The girls here always marry outsiders and move away
leaving untouched statues of their fifteen-year-old
selves behind.
But the boys bring in wives
from distant villages,
wives who go into labor on heaps of grass and straw in a barn
and bear prophets.
Forgive me, I‘d meant to say 'only one will be a prophet'.
The others will spend their lives throwing stones
(that is part of the prophecy, too).
At noon on an autumn day like today
they will bolt out of school like a murder of crows stirred by the
smell of blood
and chase the postman‘s skeleton of a car
as it disappears around a corner, leaving only dust.
Then they will steal wild pears from the 'bitch‘s yard'
and nobody will stop them. After all, she deserves it. She‘s sleeping
with two men.
Between the pears in one boy‘s schoolbag
lies a copy of Anna Karenina.
It will be skimmed over, impatiently, starting on the last page
cleansed and glorified, like old news.
VERTICAL REALITIES
Waking is an obligation:
three generations open their eyes every morning
inside me.
The first is an old child – my father;
he always chooses his luck and clothes one size too small for him.
Next comes grandfather…In his day, the word 'diagnosis' did not exist.
He simply died of misery six months after his wife.
No time was wasted. Above their corpses
rose a factory to make uniforms for dockworkers.
And great-grandfather, if he ever existed,
I don‘t even know his name. Here my memory goes on hiatus,
my peasant origins cut like the thick and yellow nails
of field-workers.
Three shadows loom like a forest over me
telling me what to do
and what not to do.
You listened to me say 'good morning'
but it was either an elephant pounding on a piano
or the seams coming apart in my father‘s little jacket.
Indeed, my father, his father, and his father before that
are not trying to change anything
nor do they refuse to change anything; the soap of ephemerality
leaves them feeling fresh and clean.
They only wish to gently touch the world again
through me, the way latex gloves
lovingly touch the evidence
of a crime scene.
MONDAY IN SEVEN DAYS (Part 2, Part 5, Part 8, Part 9)
2
Like salmon, ready to mate,
swimming upstream from the sea
to the river‘s estuary
the wedding guests step backward in time
and beg the landlady to return their flesh:
'Mine is bright white…'
'Mine is soft, with a burn from a hot iron on my forearm…'
'Mine smells of sage, like a canvas bag…'
'Mine is magical, you can wear it inside out…'
'Give me anything – it doesn‘t matter!'
Here comes Mustafa, the drunkard,
with his head stuck to his body‘s right side.
He is Monday‘s Saint, guilty of everything,
absorbing everyone‘s sins
like a swab of alcohol-dabbed cotton
pressed to a wound.
5
Broken toys were my playthings:
zebras, wind-up Chinese dolls, ice-cream carts
given to me as New Year‘s presents by my father.
But none was worth keeping whole.
They looked like cakes whose icing had been
licked off by a naughty child
until I broke them, cracked and probed their insides, the tiny
gears, the batteries,
not aware then that I was rehearsing
my understanding of freedom.
When I first looked at a real painting
I took a few steps backward instinctively
on my heels
finding the precise place
where I could explore its depth.
It was different with people:
I built them up,
loved them, but stopped short of loving them fully.
None were as tall as the blue ceiling.
As in an unfinished house, there seemed to be a plastic sheet
above them instead of a roof
at the beginning of the rainy autumn of my understanding.
8
'If you have dark skin
your smile is exquisite,
neither incomplete nor flashing rotten teeth.'
F. knows this. She mourns for her son.
Early in the morning she opens the window
lights the kerosene stove
with a piece of crumpled telegram still in her hand
sweeps the yard, feeds the chickens, cooks for ten,
fixes the chair with the sphinx‘s arms
opposite the door.
And each day
with the claws of a hawk she fights against
disorder
begging for form and discipline
like the square plots of a field of wheat
guiding the part of herself that flies mercilessly
in a straight line
never landing.
She accepts greetings with her eyes
and pathways open before her
like the Sabbath among other days,
dedicated to gratitude and prayer.
9
Medio tutissmus ibis, the middle is the safest ground.
The embroidered tablecloth in the middle of the table.
The table in the middle of the carpet.
The carpet in the middle of the room.
The room in the middle of the house.
The house in the middle of the block.
The block in the middle of the town.
The town in the middle of the map.
The map in the middle of the blackboard.
The blackboard in the middle of nowhere.
Lola is an angel. Her forehead hasn‘t grown since she was eight,
her centre of gravity unchanged. And she likes edges, corners,
although she always finds herself
in the middle of the bus
where people rush toward the doors at either end.
My neighbours never went to school
nor have they heard of aesthetics
and hardly ever have they read anything
about the Earth‘s axes, symmetry, or absolute truth.
But instinctively they let themselves drift toward the middle
like a man laying his head on a woman‘s lap,
a woman who, with a pair of scissors
will make him more vulnerable than ever
before the day is done.
PÄR HANSSON
search
it is said that you have turned inland
to avoid your own reflection
and that you sometimes do yourself harm
go in through your nose and dig out
a personal mythology
it is said that you lack simultaneous capability
as if the particulars were too plentiful
that you are unable to take that step back
in order to take in the whole picture
when silence is frenetically talked about
you already lie in the pasture and say nothing
the sun shines through the cow’s udder
it is said that you have withdrawn
made a rough necklace of dried
pike-heads and rattle around out there
hunched over the bogs
your figure has been spotted from forestry machines
when you have split boulders with the force of fire
and escaped with short quick steps
one knows that you were comfortable around books
you sounded your way through the libraries
and placed foreign objects
between the pages of certain selected
passages: dead insects
empty cartridges, fish remains
it is said that you have read too many books in a university town
small flayed-off bits of your skin have been found
stretched up inside dilapidated barns
it is said that your course of action lacks all logic
one knows that you primary live off fish and berries
but speak of you as the worst thing since the wolf
one knows that you work at night
steal laundry from the outlaying farms
and stretch bright sheets between the trees
that you use to catch fat nocturnal butterflies
you carry with you a handcrafted knife
with it you whittle bubbles in seawater
thin and full of promise night after night
it is said that you have withdrawn
in order to braid a winter coat from birch bark
to await the first snow and go into hibernation
in the abandoned dens of she-bears
one has found loose pages from your diary
has managed to decipher symbols for man weapon dog
a search-line scattered in the wind