The evil one
for Elena Shvarts
Little enough at first to come in through the keyhole,
as I learned later on, bee-sized, it nonetheless
retained a kind of graceful abnormality when,
full grown at one hand high, its wings spread in a show,
it introduced itself to me with a little nod.
In the dark countenance two eyes as black as coal
cut through the room, body so trim and so athletic
his arched back didn’t make him look the least bit elderly.
The creature stood there, black in black as in a rainbow
for the night, smiling, with his mustache’s sparse whiskers
trembling in time to the gusts of his sulfuric breath.
‘You called on Us,’ he hissed, ‘you called us with your poems,
their viper’s beauty and their underground blue mysteries . . .’
An elemental? A homunculus? A Nephilim?
I wondered from what ancient race he was descended.
‘Do you suppose’, he went on, ‘you can simply stroll
as you see fit among Our ranks? Well, let me tell . . .’
The little dark thing on my desk got a good slap
that knocked his golden earring off; he started whining,
praying, imploring—really a pathetic character—
and offering me at the same time power beyond imagining.
The worst was when he started staying up all night
working on drafts of poems and then expecting gratitude.
He complained often: too cold, too damp, and through his chattering
pike’s teeth he stammered, ‘Someone really ought to set
fire to something, oh the red flames would be magical’.
And then, one winter evening, by accident,
he said, my manuscript burned up, that big, colourful tract
of morning stars and blue-black brier-roses that
the fiend had illustrated but that he, rebellious
as always, turned into a string of oaths and blasphemies.
Time passed, and he grew thinner, and he stopped his nagging.
He shrank and paled, turning more bluish; he began
sleeping all day, while evenings he sat up and fanned
himself in vain with his dry wings, feverish and sweltering.
The skin hung from his backbone like a sail gone slack,
his buttocks, once upon a time grape-blue and tight,
withered, and looking at his wings I could see right
through to the pale arteries where the blood had dried.
I made the little wretch a bed from a shoebox,
and though he found my sympathy repulsive, I
heard only the occasional obnoxious comment
as I rubbed Vaseline into his wings to try
and ease the awful dryness, and in my hands his long
ears were so chapped and brittle that I nearly cried.
I fed him with a coffee spoon: a sip of bullion,
a drop of rum sometimes; and this although he tried
to clamp his lips shut tight; talk about devil’s spawn!
Still, he was company; in the evenings I could tell
that he was there by glimmerings from his direction
like the last hints of light and fire in the sunset.
One morning he lay cold and rigid in his box.
It was a shock; the loneliness came welling up
then, and I wept for him on his descent to hell.
My sorrow was unfettered, wild, irrational,
and for a long time I just left him lying there.
Eventually, I went and burned him and his box
and hid away the pieces of his skeleton
from my eyes’ sorrow, hoping, too, to shield myself
from the incomprehension of both foe and friend
.But first, just out of curiosity, I measured
his corpse: twenty-four centimetres end to end.
as I learned later on, bee-sized, it nonetheless
retained a kind of graceful abnormality when,
full grown at one hand high, its wings spread in a show,
it introduced itself to me with a little nod.
In the dark countenance two eyes as black as coal
cut through the room, body so trim and so athletic
his arched back didn’t make him look the least bit elderly.
The creature stood there, black in black as in a rainbow
for the night, smiling, with his mustache’s sparse whiskers
trembling in time to the gusts of his sulfuric breath.
‘You called on Us,’ he hissed, ‘you called us with your poems,
their viper’s beauty and their underground blue mysteries . . .’
An elemental? A homunculus? A Nephilim?
I wondered from what ancient race he was descended.
‘Do you suppose’, he went on, ‘you can simply stroll
as you see fit among Our ranks? Well, let me tell . . .’
The little dark thing on my desk got a good slap
that knocked his golden earring off; he started whining,
praying, imploring—really a pathetic character—
and offering me at the same time power beyond imagining.
The worst was when he started staying up all night
working on drafts of poems and then expecting gratitude.
He complained often: too cold, too damp, and through his chattering
pike’s teeth he stammered, ‘Someone really ought to set
fire to something, oh the red flames would be magical’.
And then, one winter evening, by accident,
he said, my manuscript burned up, that big, colourful tract
of morning stars and blue-black brier-roses that
the fiend had illustrated but that he, rebellious
as always, turned into a string of oaths and blasphemies.
Time passed, and he grew thinner, and he stopped his nagging.
He shrank and paled, turning more bluish; he began
sleeping all day, while evenings he sat up and fanned
himself in vain with his dry wings, feverish and sweltering.
The skin hung from his backbone like a sail gone slack,
his buttocks, once upon a time grape-blue and tight,
withered, and looking at his wings I could see right
through to the pale arteries where the blood had dried.
I made the little wretch a bed from a shoebox,
and though he found my sympathy repulsive, I
heard only the occasional obnoxious comment
as I rubbed Vaseline into his wings to try
and ease the awful dryness, and in my hands his long
ears were so chapped and brittle that I nearly cried.
I fed him with a coffee spoon: a sip of bullion,
a drop of rum sometimes; and this although he tried
to clamp his lips shut tight; talk about devil’s spawn!
Still, he was company; in the evenings I could tell
that he was there by glimmerings from his direction
like the last hints of light and fire in the sunset.
One morning he lay cold and rigid in his box.
It was a shock; the loneliness came welling up
then, and I wept for him on his descent to hell.
My sorrow was unfettered, wild, irrational,
and for a long time I just left him lying there.
Eventually, I went and burned him and his box
and hid away the pieces of his skeleton
from my eyes’ sorrow, hoping, too, to shield myself
from the incomprehension of both foe and friend
.But first, just out of curiosity, I measured
his corpse: twenty-four centimetres end to end.
*
Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,
over the girl with her first electric, how her high,
thin voice, amplified many times
over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's
in the green grass of the festival site.
Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide
the pistil and the pollen inside.
Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands,
over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening.
It rejoices over Japan, over Korea,
over arts refined over a thousand years —
the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea.
Rejoices over the poet, that his heart still beats.
*
Your hair of snakes and flowers
When I saw one of those men touch your hair,
I heard for the first time in many a year
the ancient battle trumpets and I saw
the banners of an army winding off to war
and felt that blind power urging me to knock
him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor.
If nobody had held me back, stopped me,
I would—God help me—have killed him on the spot,
stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I'm sorry,
but you must be aware your winding hair
is different now, a hornets' nest, a snakes' lair!
Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.
*
The trash pile
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.
trad.dallo svedese: Bill Coyle
- Dog star notations, Carcanet, 2016
- Oslo - Passionen, Wahlstròm och Widstrand, 2003
*
