In this village

In every hut – a small hut –

– a single hotel room –

– a nesting box for one starling –

– a hive for one bee –

there live, one of each:

not only the old people whose families died long ago

or moved away into the wide world,

but also young ones – of different ages –

men and women, lassies and lads, and children.

 

In this village

in the morning – from every hut –

they drive out cows to graze –

cows with one horn,

one tail,

one leg,

one eye,

one teat.

 

In this village

a lonely man

comes out of a little hut –

knocking at his neighbors’ doors

to stack up a grivnya with someone

and buy one bottle of liquor

to drink together;

but he finds no one,

and returns home alone

to his hut –

a small hut,

and a little later another lonely man

leaves another hut

with the same purpose –

to meet someone –

but this man finds no one:

never, nowhere, no one does he ever meet.

(Epiphany: to find no one to drink with

is a symbol, by definition, of being lonely

and remaining lonely; unreal opportunity

of communication, problematic

for the dwellers of small huts – and a real opportunity

of which the author himself is aware.)

translated from Ukrainian by Svetlana Lavochkina

I ran into an old village neighbor

who told me about his pigeons

(he empathized with his pigeons).

(Epiphany:

a pigeon, by definition, is

“something which is in the middle”).

“Remember, I used to have a pigeonry,

and my girls wouldn’t let one of the pigeons alone –

they got it into their heads

to teach it homing.

To its leg, they would tie a flower

from the garden by the house,

and when the flowers wilted,

a spoon or a fork;

when they ran out of spoons or forks,

they would tie a nut or a screw

that were always scattered about in the yard

(my motor bike always needed repair!) -

and they would let the pigeon fly.

(Epiphany:

a flower, by definition,

is something “which is the most beautiful thing in the world”;

a spoon or a fork,

a nut or a screw is “something small”).

But the pigeon could not fly far with such a letter:

just over the valley

to the path on the opposite side,

and there on the path it would always sit down.

Did you, perchance, see that pigeon -

you often walked that path beyond the valley?”

“No, not once. Maybe

it managed to fly away,

having somehow undone

every new letter with its beak

before I appeared on the path –

although sometimes

a garden flower,

a spoon or a fork,

a screw or a nut

would catch my eye,

but not once did I connect these

to your orchard,

your pigeons,

your motor bike in eternal need of repair.”

“It all happened in the summer

when my younger girl came of age

and fancied you at once –

she would only think

of you,

of your walking the path beyond the valley.”

translated from Ukrainian by Svetlana Lavochkina

Soon, when your foot treads European soil once more,

and this five weeks since your departure, weeks of sheer torture,
then subterranean electric shocks will go
throughout our Union, on up to my exile’s Oslo,
where heart and soil will shake with a volcanic explosion
that breaks the crust and melts like blood all that opposes
the scattered flowers that resurrect themselves and grow
up suddenly among the bird’s nests, fruit trees holding
their branches empty from sheer faithfulness, devoted
as no place can be save our hopeless old Europa.
Evenings we put on black, mirrors wear veils of mourning
in bedrooms, and the people here seem gauche and gross.
Since you’ve been gone, the sick have lain past hope of cure
the juvenile delinquents go more antisocial,
and, backs turned on their inspiration, most of the poets
incline to striking noncommittal, modest poses.
But tell me, did you find the deep peace of the soul
there beneath aqua skies the sun had edged with gold
with your hands clasped together in an open lotus,
did your “I” wink out there in that country that extols
the qualities of concentration and composure,
or did you take from the world’s dripping claw the flow
of wild blood down the cheeks of young men, from the sold-off
attractions of the women, from game cocks and cobras,
that blood that burns through the illusory world we know?
Or maybe, in the arms of the one you’re travelling with,
you’ve put off choosing either, gold-bronze, oiled up, glistening,
with just the inside of your navel showing snow-white still,
and chilled, refreshing drinks borne out to you, until
those of us here at home seem less and less familiar,
unreal as movements in those rice fields in the distance.
In any case, know that he, too, is loved. And this
I say by way of vindicating your suspicion
that I am an entirely lost individual.
Rather than Buddha’s calm, I choose the Crucifixion,
choose love, its fires, rather than desire extinguished,
falling in love, with all its painful probabilities
all the way up from graves’ remaining residuum
of friends from youth, little white powders that don’t fill
the urns they were poured into. They were killed,
but we’re here still.

 

When you return, as soon you will,

oh then at Santiago de Compostela, pilgrims
will gather, on their knees, like me, because you are immanent….
I await you like the dealer waits for his big shipment
of “snow” from dreamland, from the drug’s pure spring. Listen,
a touch is the one thing that can deliver me,
the landing gear being lowered, then the landing strip,
you disembarking, then the soft click of your flip flops
through Schönefeld or Charles de Gaule, and my one wish is
that everything might start again from the beginning,
the continent be salvageable and I with it;
decay, instead of disappearing bit by bit,
reverse and circle back into its genesis,
so that again there comes the swell of hidden rivers
beneath tree bark and feathers and the thin, pale skin.
And if that fails, well, then, if things could just continue
the way they were before, go on with the same pitiless
longing that through ranged years of creativity,
love, self-destruction, neither failed nor found fulfillment.
Europe is in your hands, come home, grant my petition.

translated from Swedish by Bill Coyle

When you tell stories from the years spent in Alaska,

about that sojourn with an Indian tribe you had,

I feel a fraction of my old enthusiasm

for the aboriginal and primeval coming back.

It seems that they had everything a man could ask for:

the most advanced appliances, the latest flat screens.

but as for sanitation…The whole tribe would track

out to the midden situated out in back,

the houses round it in a ring, and stick their asses

out at the pile’s round slope; it wasn’t all that bad

in fall and spring, but the cold stung you like small daggers

in winter and in summer the stench made you gag,

on bright nights that lured the whole local population

of beryl-blue and beer-bottle-glass green metallic

flies to the light of your softly bulbous white lamp.

Forgive me, love, it’s just that I can actually see it

before me, your red lips and nails eleven fast points

of color in that oceanic light’s abstraction.

Backlit, the trash heap glittering with its bottle glass,

with bones the dogs as yet can’t wrench loose sticking out

as if they were the armored horns of a great dragon

that has been slumbering beneath the logged-out forests.

It sighs with exhalations and evening, spasms passing

through it. A wyrm, a tragic creature dreaming half

awake, its green eyes made of bottle-bottoms’ glass,

its body of plastic, car parts, animal cadavers.

The salmon harvest strands here, and mussel shells, perhaps,

if not just chicken nuggets from a gold mine run

by our all-powerful, global conglomerate or one

of its subsidiaries—as here the last Indians

watched cable and drank beer. Though when it comes to that,

all I have actual experience of is the trash pile,

not the canoes by the Pacific Ocean, dragged

up at day’s end and filled with summer daylight practically

undiminished when as evening light it gleams.

The trash pile towers over the surrounding flatlands

following a curved stretch of coastline, and it seems

to me to stretch along with the meridians

from Pole to antipode, at the world’s top from white

calotte to dark blue coast, under an airy sphere.

Your shimmering orb, Lord of this world: Now the earth shines,

and the trash pile, listen how it ferments like wine,

in glory, welfare bound for the celestial port.

It shines: scrap, metal, and bones with muscle fibers

of microchips’ spider veins along the circuit boards.

Our world’s luxurious trash, Lord, to your honor here:

the core industrial waste, soft parts on the outside,

organically composted, smoke and vapors hung

above the trash pile, arching like the planet curves

along the bends of the Pacific’s edge and tongue.

The shadings billowing across the mountain slopes

in late light pass the ocean and the pile, shifting

form and color as if their praises were being sung.

A trash heap in a wasteland, shimmering still

with the pine forests’ phosphor green and sea’s chrome blue,

a tract where evening light is delicately flung

down with the angel to this demarcated dump.

A Zion both of swarming life and of decay,

a motley multiplicity doomed to waste away.

A place where you can see the whole sky at one time,

briskly chill, and widely eye each diamond cut

detail of the globe’s day that hurries on its way.

What can I call you, dismal pile, who sparkle when

a ray of light falls where you show yourself as soiled

as here, in this stench, all our expectations spoiled.

You dream in vain of the cocoon’s emancipation,

for what higher purpose and meaning continuing to live,

with only spasms standing in for the resurrection

deep in the interior’s seething fermentation,

and seeing only with swarms of compound insect eyes

mosquitos and bluebottles in cloud formation circling

around you in a dusk that lasts the whole night through.

Midsummer soon and far up in the blue meridians

A sordid trash pile craves a benediction, too.

Up from the lowest level it perpetually stretches,

Lord, and it lauds unto its last breath your creation.

translated from Swedish by Bill Coyle