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The stone’s silence
Issue 2/2000 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
From Kiven vaitiolo (‘The stone’s silence’, Tammi, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz
I buried you
in an onion field
the way to take care of a love whose stems
suddenly rupture, tubes break
the earth's covered by
chickweed, goose foot and red-veined
leaves of sorrel, deep down
the inflamed wound, as sand that glints
in the soil, underground
golden domes and weeping under the crust
I tear
with dry hands the green and you do not hear
because you are cry and dirt
and onion and God and a man who's been thought
into the ground
and the sun is wise and hot, underground
the trees' root systems are fishing
for strength
there is enough left for a sigh
The net
Issue 2/2000 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Verkko (‘The net’, WSOY, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz
The descent
Down the stairs, out through the gate into the street
and you wonder
what the cobblestones had in mind
with the waves that beat
and the rock that was humbled
smooth in the course of millennia.
Streetcars would rumble
toward them with ancient god force.
Now the stones lie there quietly like
fish blown ashore
petrified by the sun.
Their memory is short. Steel is mute.
The rails remember Kallio, remember Töölö.
Words are thinner than they used to be;
they’ve been walked over too many times.
The city. more glabrous, no longer stretches
algae-covered tentacles to the gates of Babylon.
Like an animal with a premonition, the city pulls its soft parts
inside a calcareous shell, does its work there in secret.
Much has disappeared: no more twitching tectonic plates
brought on by words, no electric storms in the bowels.
Coffee is the measure of violence: no more tobacco
in whose smoke one could heal loneliness and the world.
As before, you look through glass, just a thin glass,
at the sidewalk and trees facing the restaurant. A man
is pushing a baby carriage. The glass reflects your face very briefly.
Part of you is out there, part stumbles about again in some Yoldia
a mute stone and a worn hope in his pocket. still,
that the world’s mute stones would break down into song, give
voice, crumble a couple of notes here, and a key.
Vermeer: the kitchen maid
A great painting does not require a great subject,
kings in pantyhose, the Peace of Westphalia.
The kitchen maid pours milk in a bowl, and soon
the canvas brims with self-radiant liquid
in which the morning and chunks of bread float.
The trap is primed. No rat to be seen.
Bits of something white roll on the floor. Smelling salts?
Under the milky film of the wall there are things
going on that the maid has no inkling of
a cockroach makes its way through the sawdust,
enzymes dismantle compounds into smaller pieces.
Farther away, a star collapses
and begins to radiate darkness.
Its message – a quantum of black light –
reaches Helsinki only today,
a city surrounded by ramparts of snow.
These, among other things, influence
my being what I am.
I wrap myself in darkness and wait
for the next whim, a tiny,
decisive mistake.
That’s why
The half-drowned
apartment building drifts.
Between the stuccoed ribs
disease blooms, sprouts tendrils.
punctures pulmonar alveoli. articular capsules.
Every night I could melt into the tub
until the water darkens to a hepatic dream.
One must protect oneself against the outside air.
The light draws boundaries that are too clear.
One must protect oneself against the brightness of skin.
That is why I travel deeper into your chest,
crave the tar from your lungs and the tracheae
into which I blow, a fanfare, when we are
heat and hunger,
grow vertically up from the ground toward
the fainted sun,
pull up rails, roots, traffic signs,
rusty legends,
rear up to the height of our withers, slop sweat and oil.
Aerial view
These wondrous mobiles
with which we can conquer distances.
Only the view always is the same heavenly
snow drift, nothing but condensing steam.
Icarus must have cooled his wings here,
the wax whose precise consistency is a mystery to us.
The higher he rose
the worse he froze
until the wax became too cold and melted.
By scientific means machines have been built
in which a human being can rise and fly to another
planetary phenomena in his belly
such as the direction of blood’s circulation. Loneliness
has rarely been a castle in whose cellar
philosophy was tinkered with or music distilled.
The horses were harnessed for death, the rest into museums,
cast in plastic.
The polar sea folds into a pocket
as a map that tells you where you should already
be, and how.
Translated by Anselm Hollo
Aqua Regia
Issue 2/2000 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Kuningasvesi (‘Aqua Regia’, WSOY, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz
Aqua Regia
Aqua regia, aqua regia, thus dissolve into you tallow candles and wing-wax, and in the distilled sun's bowl gold's will is broken. Equal in you are ergot and lightning-rod platinum, no difference between feather and lead, if you perish to become what you love you are the dawn's own.
Medieval landscape
He is a man who takes the measure of words as if each one of them were an angel. Rarely do they agree peaceably to dance with gravity.
You can see him sowing his hymns under the wrong balconies, and that is when even one stammering syllable feels like lightning striking your hip.
Sufficient ransom, if you remember the name oft he one you long for. His own the man curses like a fleur de lys, burnt seal on a shoulder.
Diogenes
You citizen of the world and the barrel troublemaker in the town square Whose heart is a mustard seed and whose memory-is quicklime Who fraternizes with stray dogs and hates coins more than fleas Tell us what they taste like raw cuttlefish and lupine What it feels like to search lantern in hand for the sun buried in shame Tell us how great is the freedom envied even by Alexander How small an empire compared to a slave's brash request: 'Sell me to that man. He needs a master.'
Translated by Anselm Hollo
The Mermaid Café
Issue 2/2000 | Archives online, poetry
From Cafe Sjöjungfrun (‘The Mermaid Cafe’, Söderströms, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz
Caesura
Yesterday we had the first evening of autumn
even though it is still July. The cool
moist darkness lights that seemed
softer, the Esplanade’s octagonal cone
lit up red, yellow and green above
the underground tunnel from restaurant
to hotel. In the row of lime trees
worn garlands began to show, more
than a third of their light bulbs gone, broken
lines of burning dots gently
swaying. Farther away
sun-bleached awnings, some oily
neon, it, too, segmented,
and people moving
at a calmer pace, already anonymous,
close to unreal reflected in glass panes,
entryways, street lamps shaped like big hooks.
Traffic noise becomes more explicit
as if in an echo chamber or does it
grow more dense as if we walked about
with yellowing wads of cotton in our ears
or a window or a door was closed
and voices a moment ago
distinct, or at least partly,
are transformed into a numb buzz,
all that remains of the message
are ups and downs, a caesura when the conversation, at regular intervals,
reaches a rhythmic point of rest.
Upstairs, downstairs
Issue 1/2000 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
From Harmia lämpöpatterista (‘Trouble with the radiator’, Gummerus, 1999). Introduction by Tero Liukkonen
The view
From here, I can see straight into their bedroom. The thin man chases the red-haired mountain of lard; round and round the room they go: the man is swinging something in his hand, I can’t see what, while the lard-mountain squeals until the man throws her onto the bed. The same thing happens every night; I can’t see the bed. Too low, and I wouldn’t want to, besides; lewd ugly makes me sick that I can even think of it.
Downstairs a young man is always watching TV, sitting there motionless all evening. The blue flickers, never turns on the light, a young man. He has long, slender legs and arms, but his face I can’t see, it’s too dark. There are painting tools on his window sill. More…
A smell of the sea
Issue 1/2000 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Namnet på tavlan Klee målade (The name of the picture Klee painted’, Schildts,1999; Kleen taulun nimi, Otava, 1999; Finnish translation by Jaakko Anhava). Introduction by Hannu Väisänen
Old harmony
You see an old street and stop outside a gate to a shadowy inner courtyard. An oak tree grows there, its crown stretches towards the light. How big it is! On a bench underneath it an old couple sit looking at you. They are trying to discover what you once were. Beside them lies an old lute, like a large, gleaming fruit. You go over to it, pick it up, play a chord. The old woman and the old man look at you without surprise. It has all happened once before, after all. Not much more is needed, only a deep silence. The oak tree murmurs, the old couple have gone, you sit there with your wife and see someone entering the courtyard. Do we know him, you say. But scarcely have you finished your question than the courtyard is empty again, a moment in eternity. More…
One more time
Issue 4/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Kun elän (‘As I live’, Tammi, 1999). Introduction by Pekka Tarkka
XI
Here is a treetop
with three
thousand branches,
three thousand
names, whose
syllables no one
knows, three
thousand minds,
one murmur
traversed by a
breath, a sentence,
I’m afraid to say
anything,
a million leaves
sough, speechless,
a thousand dark
branching roots,
names in the soil,
a million words
in humus heaven
a thousand sprouts
bloom yet are lifeless,
dead heroes,
pointless tales,
three million
wrinkles. faces
obscured
by branches,
in the brain’s roots
a new person’s thought
is born and
hums through branches,
roots,
the smoke disappears
through the branches,
the smoke disappears.
XVIII
He saw faces behind the glass,
heard himself breathe.
With his fingertips, he brushed the glass surface
but it was not the same as skin.
Slowly, he arranged what he saw,
that blurry motion, but it did not work
as an architecture, the kind
a living city is perennially building.
He opened up to a gaze, froze,
lost the game altogether.
Then the scythe disappeared. He opened
a window onto the street, heard
leaves rustle as if waking up
to life, one more time.
Intermission
But I did not sing,
I chased her away,
flushed the toilet, paced
circles in the living room
like a moth that looks for
a place to land
or a solution that does not exist
to a problem that probably
does not exist either,
just a wall full of
leather-backed books
and seats among which
the moth chooses one, a
commodified insomnia
a landscape someone
invented once: palaces,
persons, tensions,
systems and maps
constructed by language insects
on top oft he void,
in the air, an imago mundi
never seen before
never before heard-of
utopias, illnesses
people prefer to endure
rather than
giving up, once they have
forgotten the war’s causes
or the cornerstone of their learning
ground up to gravel
long ago, they still love
the country they have
destroyed, for love
is stronger than
its object, and who
needs it, the group
eats reason and everything learned,
it turns us into beasts,
the congregation executes
its christ, the state
its sages, but the sleepless
animal keeps wrestling
in the mud with its inner
hero, the beast; yearns, spits,
rages and grieves, looks for
reconciliation, tries
to mediate and interpret
between invisible enemies
to whom only sleep and murmur
can lend a shape, until the image
finally shatters
into sentences, steps
into line between covers,
on the shelf: in the closed pages
simmers yet another delirium
no one has ever seen before.
Four o’clock
Don’t know why I burst out laughing
in bed, but someone instantly answered
as if by rote, as if
comprehending eternity,
laughing without malice, life
and soul of the party, cruel
as a certain hero
who was asked to hold up
the roof while they were still making
speeches in the hall, while the fool
scratched his belly, raised his cup
to the host. while a woman
raised her skirt, the whole forest laughed
and every demon claw
inscribed history. from which
the laughter freed him.
All of a sudden the clock struck four,
but I heard only my heartbeat,
the rush of systole and diastole,
tides of a muddy delta,
the sleepless whimper
of birth and death, the streams of cellular fluids,
the pulsing of stars, the animal’s paws
as it padded along the runner,
all in step; not long now until the wolfs hour,
nothing stirred on the plains, I felt
a thundercloud push down on my forehead,
and the wind died, the grass
stopped rustling, sugar coagulated, and then
lightning stopped my heart with one blow,
in one rapid motion my hand
tore off the pillow case, my body
sat up in bed, my mouth shouted,
the primal animal, evolution howled.
Upright. he stood in front of me,
in the rearview mirror the car came closer
struck me again and again from behind
with a huge iron fist, made words burst
from my mouth, the car rose into the air: a plane,
a pegasus galloping straight at the pillar,
now muteness, the windshield
cracked, flew out in one piece
to rest on the hood
in the rearview mirror the car
came closer again, I saw how I flew
into the foliage, in my mind
two separate memories:
thus memory shatters time, and so
one can look at the past as true,
barely, barely endure it: she
bent over me, said something.
At the wake, lips moved. behind
the glass stood a fair boy
whom I knew, even though
he had already grown up to be a man.
Translated by Anselm Hollo
Between two loves
Issue 4/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
From Se tapahtui täällä (’It happened here’, Otava, 1999). Introduction and interview by Nina Paavolainen
She thought of the period between two loves as a spacious room, full of light, outside whose windows the seasons change unhurriedly. On the walls are reflections of the morning light. There is the sound of piano music; and the number of rooms grows. Somewhere, far away, a young girl, dressed in white, is at the piano; the wind fans the curtains. Slow awakening, the soft rocking of time, the sound of bare feet on a wooden floor. In the air there is the scent of flowers, apples, and the gentle morning breeze, and perfume, and the scent of clean, ironed clothes and furniture wax. The afternoon shadows are long and cool; the pages of a book rustle slowly. Now the music pauses.
Delina
Issue 3/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Löytöretkeilijä ja muita eksyneitä (‘The explorer and other lost people’, Tammi, 1999). Introduction by Soila Lehtonen
The stranger met Delina at a development organisation’s work camp, but Delina was not a volunteer. Delina lived in the country permanently.
The stranger did not spend very much time in Delina’s company. His evenings were spent with fellow-volunteers in the village cafe, where Delina’s parents did not allow her to go. During the day, both of them worked in their separate ways: Delina at home and the stranger in the work camp’s fields.
The stranger did, however, get to know the girl well enough to hear that she was in love with a soldier called Zmiri from the nearest garrison. This soldier was arrested once when he and his comrades drunkenly molested volunteers – but Delina knew nothing of the case. More…