LV
Democracy’s secret In free, general elections, with secret ballots
There, too, is music’s concealment, its inaccessibility, eye
to eye Where coercive power, over the other, does not
exist This is music’s secret When music moves,
sovereign, in time, its own time For that is what defines it
South African faces, in the first free election The dignity,
the joy breaking through, the laughter, the tears And the wave
of warmth As if the terrorist bombs, the violence, did not even exist
Amandla! The strength to do what? The power to do what? We shall see –
There’s the fear that disappointment will come Also inside
myself But that is not I Objective music sounds
for a moment That which is history If that summary word has
any meaning whatsoever
I have been here before When in the city park in Lund
I took off my hat on the first of May, when we sang
the Internationale, at a Social-Democratic gathering, in the early
60s A warm rain fell on my head New, light-green leaves
That I, too, grasped democracy’s secret The unification of
fellowship and sovereignty Respect for the worth of every
human being Later another kind of transparency came, the blinding
Every moment democracy must be won anew As if
it were always indefensible, defensively As if it just
existed as light actively moving outward For a short time it can eliminate
violence But violence can grow overpowering As can the violence of others against others
This is no excuse Worth itself is always obliterated by murder
LVII
We flee furiously in the directions of all the senses Also in nothing’s
There is no difference Even the flame of nothing burns
We are inside the function There is nothing outside it
As if the wandering between vowels and consonants
were also a wandering between the mountains Parmenides
and Heraclitus, or between the discrete and the continuous
A dance of vowels and consonants; where they also change functions
A generalized pattern of gesture; the movements of the larger body; also
semantically, conceptually
The play of feelings and of interests I see the outer
surfaces of faces, the small tic in the cheek,
the darkness passing over the skin, in spite of
all that is said, in languages that lie
Every power struggle is destruction Breaking apart the
fragile form Where it issues, free of constraints,
from the captivity that is existence Dark
matter of the soul; of an indeterminate sort We are here
only for a short time On the near-infinite interior surfaces . . .
What is time? That which uses us In the larger brain –
Vowel lengths are decisive, also of the tension in
interior rhythm Whichever mountain we leap off; so the
stretto also happens between mountains Mussels resting
darkly in strata of clay, living, breathing the clear water;
or practically fossils already Under the increasing weight
Scraping sounds Explosions of consonants Vibrating R-notes, grating
The danse macabre of crystals As if they were already principles The heart’s
freedom breathes –
LVIII
All the irons in the fire If they are irons If it is fire –
As a child I saw the irons in the forge The sputtering sparks
from the anvil . . .
The peculiar comfort of fire The generalized conflagration
Where will I be when it comes? Will I be defenseless?
The opening for all language, all images, all sound
Only through listening, seeing, speaking-singing can it work
Straight through the stone that shines monstrously And the terror of the idyll
I touch you with the wing of pain; lightly, lightly, lovingly
Each moral problem carries its inner darkness
The darkness precipitates hatred It does not have to dominate . . .
Word comes: Yet another of my friends has cancer I hear his
voice on the telephone, it is not he who tells me about it,
I believe he understands that I know, but we talk about
other things His intellect is intact, as if the immanence of death
did not touch it at all We speak about language, about grammar
Analytical or normative I propose the possibility
that the differently constructed faculties of language in our two cerebral hemispheres
perhaps give rise to two different kinds of syntax, engaging each other
in a dialogue Within myself I hear the dichotomies, recurrent
on many levels, ontologically, epistemologically Also
emotionally, perhaps; but I also imagine a kind of tri-
section A constantly growing number of factors
I remember a sketch I did when I was 18 years old, of a tower constructed
of shards patched together, which was also a plant, or
a rising member Rising into the invisible counterpart Then I listen to
the aged voice, hear its liveliness, its acuity, when new thoughts
come to mind We talk about new poetry; how it is possible to perceive
the exact taste of its language, its edge That one can go wrong, but this sense is still
unerring
I realize that soon we will not be speaking with each other any more This hurts
What have I learned? I have seen incorruptibility, concentration, seriousness
I think about another one of my friends, who died of the same kind of cancer
The same kind of face, when the great music played The same light, coming from inside
the face
LX
With V I talked about the young heifers in the meadow
As a child she was a shepherdess, tending cows and sheep
She spoke with expertise about the ages of calves When I said
one of them was a beauty she replied: They are all beautiful!
We spoke about flowers, their names, in Swedish and in Latvian
Our language was English We spoke about something else, not
politics, not nationalisms, rather about the intense, open
human emotion, love Virgin Mary’s keys are also
Mother-of-God’s hand The whole hand open, fingers spread
We looked at twayblade, and at St. Peter’s keys
At Digerhuvudet on Fårö she walked away alone
along the white rubblestone shore, her brown shawl
swept around her head, an old woman, a figure of pain
I also walked away, but in the other direction, in the blinding
light from the stones, the sea, below attacking terns
When I came back to the group I saw her
She showed me her find, a clump of moss the size of a fingertip, gleaming
silver I showed her mine: a coral shaped like a clam shell, petrified,
four hundred million years old
All we did not talk about What came after the dictatorship
The conflict of pain What “the national” is, if other than a fiction
And what in that case this fiction means I do not know
LXI
Straight through disorientation and death The near-infinite
landscapes that rise toward the sky and the sea
Flowering meadow saxifrage, a sea of white over the heath
where the curlew takes flight The lapwing The oystercatchers
Where burnt orchids, small purple-and-white orchids bloom
And pasque flowers, their little heads Junipers wander
away into the distance toward infinity A road A lighthouse
The series of overtones rises, all the more steeply Silence
We have inner thresholds of velocity, thresholds of comprehension
Time’s limits, upward and downward; limits of integration
Humans; we move in real landscapes
beyond all models Including those we make of our-
selves Infinite fineness does not suffice –
We will approach maturity So many of my friends are dying now
Are dying or already dead I listen to the pain, the
fragile limit of the voice, clear Then come the hiccoughs, the lump
in the throat, the small touch of valor I try
to just be there Consolation is impossible What could I
possibly have to offer I hear my own voice vibrate
Into the white storm-space Nothing has
changed there Out there is only storm, invisibly
racing clouds, surging trees of pain, on every leaf a
face, mutable, as if on a small gold screen
Mirrors of metal, burnished Water Clear as glass Within the whiteness a
distant black point, rapidly approaching Out there
across the sea I hear its roar The scent of salt Seaweed
I too flee for protection But it doesn’t help
Rwanda The picture that comes into focus more and more clearly One of
the larger genocides, also of this century
Churches have been transformed from asylums into abattoirs Everywhere
corpses lie, rotting bodies Children Women Men
The numbers are always growing The radio station of the Hutu extremists
broadcasts nonstop exhortations “to exterminate the cockroaches,”
the Tutsis An officer in the Tutsi guerillas speaks of Auschwitz,
that Europeans also gave themselves to such pursuits
It is still going on The smaller genocide in Bosnia goes on
The suffering is immeasurable We count the dead
Maybe we should count the living Our guilt grows and grows
Not collective guilt; but personal responsibility
LXVII
Always alone For otherwise the life of the fragile
symbols dissolves In what we do together
giving occurs; and symbols of a different kind
are born In this there is war As if conditions of peace
were contaminated at every moment A delicate balance
Deep peace At night I dream of snakes;
vipers, of different colors Your face
looks at me I am antisocial; cannot participate This is my
stigma; inscribed as a snakebite I bear the crescent moon
I also bear you, beloved As my living sign
How do I become a sign for you I reproach you for your goodness
Thus I am evil From the cave my dream is also born:
a single god, colorless,
with no face
Then the light from within is lit We illuminate the world Crystal!
LXX
Now the dead call to me from out at sea, where the sun sets
over the tongue of land, in violet haze Around the sun two rainbow fragments,
like widely spaced quotation marks It’s as if the dead could now also
meet While we, the survivors, walk on the shore
Everything is only provisional The sea moves calmly Terns fly
along the water line, its irregular form New
sandy beaches are forming; at intervals briefer than I could have imagined
Other stones lie there, more than a thousand years
We are in the presence of the order of permanent murder, its smaller
eternity; and thus not eternal Its abolition is on the agenda
For us and for those who survive us For all the dead!
New bladder wrack moves in the clear water Women are swimming, a few
of them In the distance the city is visible, where I first saw the order
Freedom’s wing also came from there Like a measurement from inside From the
opened order…
