Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Poems from Regnets uråldriga sätt att regna (‘The rain’s primordial way of raining’, Schildts, 1993)

the necessity of low tide
the necessity of still, mud-grey days
where the bird’s egg and your memory hide in the sand of the shy

the weak light
made of molten wind

and our faces deep inside the shadow.
we sleep: we dream a dream of sprouting shoots,
of the red heads of the newborn children
that palpitate beneath the ice –

*

The cave,
the silence of the cave

the view out towards a pulsating light
where nothing can be discerned

*

the rain’s primordial way of raining
and his warm body that sleeps
in that lighting. and the rain’s sound:
a text that began once upon a time,
that keeps darting in whispers and whitening, disintegrating to a new, precambrian
meaning where his body and warmth grope;
a larva swaddled in mist and faceless
but seehing the face and sound of everything –

to stop anywhere…
but not at the stopping-places

to stop where the wind booms its loudest, whitest light

or here: in the shadow of two bushes,
at the insignificant place
where a young bird rises for the first time off the ground

*

the bees, stopped in gusty air
and your dreams so strong I see them:
the bees against that translucent wall
whose shadow suddenly hurls itself clattering
to the ground

… I know, I know!
at the last second
something has saved itself
from the black water,
the painfully shining night

*

Old age approaches in a racing car. I quickly throw myself to
the side, into the grass by the edge of the road. But I do not
escape the driver's face: it hits me like an enlarged mirror-image
I immediately turn into, frozen in its frozen movement.
        A face of clay. Watery-pale, almost blind eyes. The hair whitened, thin.
        I recognise it. I recognise it as in a dream I would like to
wake up from – and which I wake up from with a piercing but inaudible
cry for time.

*

flight tickets to the cemetery

‘but the plane is standing still’
in the zinc-blue air
‘miss! miss!’

She breaks into a childish smile,
shakes her head
and

… on closer consideration,
(with a ribbon in her hair), yes:
on closer consideration

*

	                            fifteen atheists dig dig

not easy to bury God

	                            : one foot sticking up 
	                            an indefinable face
	                            (hovering above the soil and)

there was a singing of spades	               of their speech and eyes

	                             fifteen atheists sweat sweat

God did nothing 
but was there

Translated by David McDuff