You’ve waded through the deep, fresh snow into a forest clearing. Around a stump of an oak, healthy mushrooms used to grow in August, in the shade of wide foliage and blackberry bushes. Th e snow was marked by hundreds of footprints, layered like bones in a prehistoric cemetery of animals. As if those who
For Tomas Transtromer It stopped snowing. Th e branches of the fi rs release the extra load. In front of you a fresh ski track that vanishes in the valley. Nameless terrain: Geilo, Tatras, Västeras region, Moon? Not a living soul around. Your breath keeps you on track. Cosmic silence. Th e swoosh of
Come, she said, the Geiranger Fjord below us is thousand meters deep. If you were to disappear in it, who would notice, I ask you? Come, she said, the Briksdal glacier above us has sky-blue cracks. If you were to disappear in it, in thousand years they would fi nd the fi rst Slavic mummy.
THE DIPLOMAT’S DISAPPEARANCE Read More »
Autumn fell suddenly on streets of Oslo on my sunburned birthday. Rain lashed my car’s windows furious as lust in a frigid woman. Cold waters washed the guano from the bronze heads of muscled, middle-aged men in Vigeland Park. Unmoved, I watch a blond girl lick an ice cream cone with a velvet tongue. I
Duino stays with angels, invisible, the count fl ew to London, the audience is cancelled… However, the baroness… would like to remember, the book of Marie von Th urn und Taxis lies on the table, a manuscript as beautiful and mysterious as those times, those times… “On this estate, while fl eeing, the French dauphins
SILENCE WITH RILKE Read More »
You spoiled something back there at the beginning, a vowel, a syllable, a word, and the poem’s inedible now, like strawberry jam capped with mold. Someone spoiled something back there at the beginning, the Lord, the twenty-fourth pair of chromosomes, and the poem’s buried now like a tallith in a mass grave. You spoiled something
Let your lips remain like an unsealed testament, Kiss me, kiss me as if this were the last moment of our reunion! Let the fires of my soul be calmed in your waters, Kiss me, kiss me as if I were a ship for a lifetime! As if fate is in ambush, the hours are
First silence descended, then that drenching sorrow Time stinged inside me like a paper cut. No matter which harbors this soul takes refuge in, the same wind always blows What stands within me now is an abyss of which name I don’t know. Truly, master, how many seasons would cause the absence of a person?
If only the wind knew the direction of love, If only the earth remained true to its own silence, If only every gain were earned by the sweat of one’s brow, Then our words would never be wounded by reproach, And our path would lead us straight toward the sun. If only a bowl of
OUR SONG WOULD NEVER FADE FROM LIP TO LIP Read More »
You arrived, and roses awakened within me You arrived, and the moon rose once more in my night. The days I spent in silence for years finally found their voice I came for your gaze, for your love. I was winter, and you were the spring in the garden of my heart You were
I CAME FOR YOUR LOVE Read More »
