Poems from the collection Toivo (‘Hope’, Teos, 2011)

Mourning cloak

I will tell you, though you cannot hear it.
This is a story that you will come to forget.
I have gone, but there is no departure. And as
the meadow of absence begins to lapse into grief:
Do not grieve.

I was here a moment ago and
soon will be between the dermis and the epidermis.
I stand in a row behind myself; I am a memory of you.
Oh, you weak spark! You powerful
desire to turn into a fortune!
You were the crowd in my head.

I am serious, you only imagine me.
Don’t disappear. Leave and stay.
I’ll be no further than this.

This is a sacrilege of sorts.
My intention is to blur the boundary between the living and the dead.
My intention is to smear that line till it’s all smudged.
I’m trying to put a spark in you.
I’m writing to you so that you’ll come and visit
me. I remember things so little.

we forgive ourselves
we bury you in graveyards
we cast a blind eye on our mistakes
we let you take your reasons to the grave

Living men bear the coffin, lower it into the ground,
remove the straps, release their grip; there is a thud.
Three spadefuls of earth: The Father! The Son! And the Holy Spirit!

But I write not to release my grip; I’m writing
to hold on to you. Perhaps you too need contact,
though you no longer exist. Perhaps you’re cold,
though you no longer exist. Perhaps you feel ill,
though you are no longer. Though you are no longer, I
shall write to you. I remember what you look like.

I remember things so little.

I’ve heard this many times before: Take a photograph of me, one that records my fatigue. As a legacy I’ll leave you a leaking rowing boat, the unfinished renovations and innumerable hours of missed sleep. Sleep now. But I don’t want to sleep. Sleep now. I’m not at all tired. I’m writing to you; perhaps it’ll cheer you up. I don’t know what kind of person you are.

You are older than me; be even older.
People are absorbed into one another. And the further
I write, the further away everything shifts.

I break a cloud, but the cloud will not break. Then you shift
your weight to the leg that’s in the air and say:
‘Now I’ll lean into the emptiness that will
carry me back. Is empty a good or a bad thing?’

And everything goes on just as before. Everything has to go on just as before. There is nothing else: there is my mother, my sister and me. And the roads that run carry us towards what is to come, so that you can remain lying there on your orange blanket. The falling is my father, then that too falls away. Best do without.

I am my own father.

My mother is my father.

My sister is my father.

I cannot remember you at all.

I try to remember even less.

I am the man in our house. I am our mother’s father, and my sisters’ father, and our father’s father, and the gravel pit’s father. But dear father, I am a bad father, born of every womb. My mother is my mother, and my sisters are my mothers, and you are my mother, and all the objects in the universe are my mothers.

I am a king of sorts, donkey’s ears of sorts.

Everything I touch is imbued with the closeness that keeps mother and child alive.

Translated by David Hackston

Poems from the collection I det stora hela (’On the whole’, Söderströms, 2011)

Father’s hands
(1945)

Father’s hands were like stiff
gloves; a furious
kettle had bewitched them
in his childhood. We ride
from the church’s tall letter
along the river’s long sentence
to the parenthesis of the bridal house,
and the thunder of three hundred hooves
fills the space beneath the clouds.
I saw father driving through
his life with those numbly
gripped reins, and later,
right now, I think of the
life-long body in which a man
comes, is wounded, and goes.

Inner happening

Ignorant and young as
a hero he walks,
and the summer night is
higher and softer than the day.
He has left, but no
and doubt still remain
in each other. Rather
than consciousness they are
his slow
going. To take
decisions is not possible,
they grow as roots
grow beneath the coming
trunk!

In nocturnal light

The fields are thin; through
the worn green blanket
earth is glimpsed. But already
a leaf flutters to the ground
like a loosened flame. A car
passes. The headlights are
grey, the engine whispers.
The nocturnal light
makes everything become
meaningful. As he goes
along the road, this fallen
gravel column without origin
and goal, he is
for a moment in
a June minute of 1951
carried by something other
and eternal. At that moment,
under the clouds and
the halls, he meets
the freedom
in the word
I.

Soul and gravel

So thought the youngster: The soul
must be a sleep. First
when you touch it,
it awakes, and thus becomes
a waking sleep, a sort of
dormant marsh that
receives and buries. It happens
when you are fifteen.

He thought: Life is bigger than
its meaning, a mysterious gravel
of grey days where no one is able
to stay without the help of the
mechanical routine that dries out
the soul’s marsh.

Sauna

Foxtails crept out from
the dry wood. A floor
of smoke settled under the roof.
Slowly, degree by degree,
the sauna became alive.

I felt I was walking
into a body. The warmth
in a century-old smoke sauna
is not new: it is only sleeping,
and is woken by the fire!

Four or five enormous years
I had lived when I saw
poor people turned
to jewelry against the logs’
velvet!

The meeting with the chorus

The chorus’s song is wordless
and clear. They come
along the street, but are
not going anywhere;
their lives have always been
deeper than the future.
A tall woman is choregos.
She directs them, calm
and inaccessible
as kindness.

The song of the chorus

One cannot be born
without breaking.
Lower your words, poetry’s
crest has no wall
below it. We need
other walls, higher
and stronger
than feelings.

The exhortation of the choregos

The road through iron and mockery
is easier than these people’s
arduous way beneath
the pity of those they meet, but
do not check your pain.
You need
it.

The repose

There is a repose
long before death;
a blue chamber, high
above the years. There what
happened has no force;
you see it as a pilot
sees toy houses and the rivers’
silver threads. One is
at last ruler
over one’s life, and all
attempts stand still
forever.

Translated by David McDuff

Poems from Peippo vei (‘The chaffinch took it’, Otava, 2011)

First early

From the potato patch there rose a human seedling, too.
Winston, I called it
as it was Winstons I’d sowed in this row

Whole,
beautiful,
unmarked by hoe or blight.
I put it in the basket with the others.
It sat there in the quiet pile, at the edge,
looked on while I slogged away,
gnawing a little bit out of the side of a potato.

What was it thinking?
What could it be that earlies think about?
The first summer sparrows are fresh out of the oven.
I so wish they’d only think about nice things.

I try to look happy
to give them a good start.

I sure know you

Who told you
to put a fox costume on
when you’re so sweet on the inside?

Your zip is stuck at the back
and you won’t let me help.
I secretly cut a hole in the side
and feel around a bit with my paw.

I knew it!

There’s a silky-smooth pig’s tail
and a friendly wet snout.

There’s no law that says
you can’t pretend to be a beast
but then it’s no use feeling sorry
because no one dares
talk to you without a fur coat made of wolf.

Don’t ever go clubbing with a housewife

Doe from next door
this is the last time
I’m taking you with me!

Take your hoof off the drummer’s thigh!
You drink wine from glasses, not tumblers!

A hundred and two kilometres an hour in the cycle lane
then one leap over the bonnet;
lift your ankles, too!

Hair standing on end, the birch tree
stares after you
and doesn’t dare open its eyes
all spring.

So is it supposed to be some kind of explanation
that you’d spent a couple of days
at home with the kids?

Forecast

Over the house flew
a swan
that meant summer.
A crane meant luck
a crow home-sickness
a hen difficulties in sowing
a scaup rain
a chaffinch soup
a pie-eyed flycatcher light summer cloud.

An eider duck meant bachelors
a pigeon, a bun
a woodpecker, death
a jackdaw, laughter.

And we got almost all of them by autumn.

Nature is wise!

Past my foot
went a mallard
and said hi.

Soul-poem

I bought a ticket on the train
for the pet carriage
I wanted my soul to have its own seat

have you met my soul
it’s a curly-stemmed
outdoor cucumber
it has a clean apron and a bright laugh
it’s made up its eyes in a dark car
by memory and by feel

we have a pot-plant on the carriage window-sill
and plenty to do before Pieksämäki
furtively mocking the train announcements

I don’t get bored of its company
but I do get terrified
and wistful
and embarrassed
but it’s not dull
and if it could have a say
every seal would have pyjamas
every father a child

Lullaby

Don’t worry weasel
I’ll show you how small the bear is,
just a picture on a glass jar,
how can you have been afraid of that?

If you can’t reach
I will get all the best yesterday’s papers
from the recycling bin
and read the titles aloud by the light of the head lamp

I took a golden ball to the back yard
to hang on the lower branch of your evening pee tree
there you can spatter
looking at the glistening.

Don’t worry weasel
you’re so short you can’t fall.
Now fall into sleep.
It’s land you can see,
not worries.

(Kehtolaul

Älä murhetu murmel,
mää näytän sul kuin piän karhu o,
klasipurkin kyljes kuva vaa,
kui sää simmost olet peljänny?

Jollet uletu,
kurkotan sul paperinkeräyslaatikost
kaik parhama eilise lehre,
luven otsiko ääne ottalampu valos.

Vein takapihal
su iltapissakuuse alaoksal kultapallon killuma,
voit siin suhistel
ja kattella kimmellyst.

Älä murhetu murmel,
olet nii matalaki ettet korkealt putto.
Nyy putto une.
Maat näkyvis,
ei murhei.)

Translated by Hildi Hawkins and Soila Lehtonen

Poems from the collection Gramina. Marginalia till Horatius, Vergilius och Dante (‘Gramina. Marginalia to Horace, Virgil and Dante’, Schildts, 2011)

Surf on the net –
in the net you are
with mouse and waiting spider

Fills life’s piggy bank
until it is emptied

The paved road of envy
where you stumble

Be sufficient unto oneself?
And who is this ‘self’
who doesn’t introduce himself?

Chance conducts
from an accurate score.

Sloth, friend Virgil,
has a deep and rich soil.
Diligence dries like clay
when drought reigns.
The water, it flows, flows
like sloth, in succulent verdure.

Revered gods of oblivion,
your absent-minded power
makes memory’s landscape bright,
clear and pure, scrubbed
like the floor of truth.

Outside the poem the indescribable world,
terrified of all that is boundless,
the crazy idea, the wind, the bird,
the scent of the meadow’s wild flowers.

Anxiety’s repose on the wads of banknotes.

Golfers, beware!
Do not fall down
into the last,
black hole!

(From the Horace [Horatius] section, ‘Satirer och epoder’, ‘Satires and epodes’)

If in the dream
I move about on the sea
my next day
is a longing to be gone.

Lived as if on the eve of the last day.
It came, unexpected.

Free winds on fields,
with rape golden yellow,
sky of clouds
in childhood’s summers:
pass away, time!
But time replies:
it is not I
who is passing away.

Say goodbye, say goodbye!
But to whom, to whom
when all have already gone?
To yourself, my dear,
to yourself.

That I have no sense of reality? What reality?
The one that sneaks away into the nearest dark entrance
or punches you on the nose in a fight at the pub?
The reality that sooner or later kills you
or what you remember of a tenderness forty years ago?
Reality right now, as if now there were anything at all,
all the talk of carpe diem? Seize the day. What day?
The one that saw you born or that sees you die?
This day has gone to its fathers. Sense of reality?
Seize it, pickpocket, take reality by the scruff of the neck
So you will see what happens, how it bites back.

(From the Horatius [Horace] section, ‘Oden’, ‘Odes’)

The horses saw us,
raised their heads
then continued on the dewy pastures
in the heavy scent of greenness
as though we had not been there
and were not there

To free oneself from oneself,
be merged in the poem, unite
in deepest friendship

(From the Vergilius [Virgil] section, ‘Aeneiden’, ‘The Aeneids’)

No other company
than the grass’s scent
gramina
the beloved’s image

(From the Dante section, ‘Den gudomliga komedin. Helvetet’, ‘The divine comedy. Hell’)

Never fondled as a child
declares proudly:
there is no solace!

If a part of us
already dead
follows us,
walks about

Paradise’s
smiling pedantry

When the light no longer dazzles
that’s where your home is
and your rest

(From the Dante section, ‘Den gudomliga komedin. Skärselden’, ‘The divine comedy. Purgatory’)

Translated by David McDuff

We live in strange times
my skull full of echoes.
The rose has throbbed
the heart flowered.
In the mirror a girl on her head,
from the wall steps an old woman,
all of them familiar,
none remembered.

Suddenly here.
Fully present.
Eighty-five years.
Hands wrinkled, shaky legs.
And alive to the brim.
And over. Dripping.

Surging.

I sprinkle memories around me
like roses.
The freshness, the presence!
Soon I shall be covered in them.
Greetings from life, ye mortals!

My love, whatever your name may be,
life always rolls over itself, jostling.
I should like to be one, simple.
But what to do about the layers,
All those names, colours, memories,
since nothing fades.

So just an unmarked stone, please.
Peel the names away, grind it smooth,
I do not wish for anyone any more.
Not even myself.

The dizzying sky of a summer night
above the dark outlines of the city.
Only one lighted window.
Far away there the light descends
over the whole landscape, up and down.
Abandons the levels.

But secretly everywhere
a stubborn altitude.

Have you finally reached your zenith,
light of the summer night?
Extreme ballerina
on the tips of your toes?
Do not stop moving.
Come down slowly, slowly.

The dance of living: sheer clumsiness
without that stagger of death.

Words move like birds.
I look at the flocks disappearing beyond the horizon.
Soon I shall be mute as the forest.
The trees fall silent, no rustling,
no twittering.
What is there left to express myself with?

Am I losing my music?
Hearing is hearing,
but even my inner being can sing.
Can sing without sound,
without words
deep inside is a stone that sounds.
To itself.

No words. A smile.

A very slow, broad note,
perhaps largo.
The white lily remembers against the window,
another, budding, is as yet only beginning to experience.
Everything has a meaning.
To understand it like this!
Not suddenly – slowly, holding back
to open oneself like a bud.
This fullness, this weight.
Linger a little, wait.
Ripen. Only now will it happen,
still yourself, do not squander.
Do not be content with the passing second.
Now it is born.
The eternal present.

I have edged my dark window with stars.
In the middle quivers a blue butterfly.
Much happens these days.
Someone is talking about unimportant things
on the blue screen.
So much goes missing
when it is constantly present.
Dangerous, dangerous.
Set the alarm clock
so that the angels cannot surprise you.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

She was made of plastic strips, metal bits, artificial skin, implants, circuit boards. Her heart pumped blood like a real one, her eyes watered as necessary. She was made free and loving, and almost soulful. But the soul is a quirk, said the Creator, a human mistake causing pain and death. And confusion. And the degradation of this world. They left out what they couldn’t say, what they were unable to say. They said: your name is Carmen, go forth, find your balance on threads across the world, you are a meek machine, built to love everything except just one man. You are glowing wires, bright shiny strips of plastic, a mind made of images and tones, your step is light, go, go.

The mall’s scintillating youth choir
(gesticulating in the manner of a musical)

JOSE WALKS ACROSS THE SQUARE AT THE SHOPPING CENTRE

I can see her sequined shadow, her skin, the shadow of her laugh. She touches every man, places her hand on the shoulders of every woman. She smiles at everyone, belongs to no one, I say, look away, then back again. I stroke my jacket lapel, such joy, condemned to solitude, to ugly endings, to endings at all. But she looks at me as if she could see, shakes her head at someone and laughs. She needs no pity, nothing, a person like that doesn’t dance because someone’s holding a knife to her throat or stomach but despite this. And it’s terrible to watch.

CARMEN ENCOUNTERS JOSE IN THE OPULENT JEWELLERY STORE *

The hand as it smokes
a surging jewel
if my desire
eventually nothing left

You have a strong hand it shakes
everyone’s fingers
you say: ‘it is to steal here
to do it deftly.

And though your body
so cleanly shop
face window balance
You can open your mouth.’

And my voice asks: ‘well, how much does your fluttering heart cost, it’s on offer, how can such clean, pure water cope, the riverbed stones shining through and all the coins therein that someone casts in at night in the hope of something great?’

AND THE CHOIR TOO SINGS:         you tart
                         the guy is yours, now nick his heart

CARMEN’S TRALLALLA

Tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa
deluded with desire
he arrives who doesn’t know what he wants
your name, a blow to the breastbone
beneath the soul dimly flutters
ribs nailed to the clouds
and someone blows
into the sky’s tattered bellows

Tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa
and staples space fast
and everything is light dance
and in the flight of some waltz or other
the ground is forgotten
its unbearable call, the soil
we forget how to turn back
as the ankle won’t bend
and the earth won’t give way
no one can own another, no one

but the world melts in our hands
in the heat running from the sky
into the floor, its flame colours
crawling up your legs
oozing lava into your arms
and slow, hot fingers along my neck
yours, yours and yours
tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa

FOLK-SONG CHOIR

Weather like a fair bride, so they say:

The verdant trees, the hush of leaves
the smell of rain
the world’s grey rush all around, hands wet
the sky flows into the bed of the earth
water goes into the bed of the sea
which home would you go to
with the wrong man,
the right one on the tip of your tongue.

JOSE’S SUMMER

Carmen, the summer promises much, but when you count the days one at a time there is nothing left. I can’t take you anywhere, to the cottage, to the shore of the lake, to my home, but to ocean liners, paper planes, perhaps not even there, I can’t take you there, but in my dreams you have a room, it is here. Your hair, the shadow of your hair against the wall like the sun, quick steps, with the blade of grass in your mouth you taste of the lawn, the smell of the earth, the soil, the sharply rising sun in whose light night, jasper, beryl. The dark carnelian night. A soft breeze. A ruby lip. Innards, pulsing. The room in splinters the floor charred, desks blackened with smoke, a vitrine in the corridor shattered glass, the smell of petrol pierces the class, the window sliced, the bright day, the sun, a glowing tiger’s eye.

CARMEN ASKS JOSE

My dear boy, what does that gesture mean
that closes my path, try to smother the glow in my eyes
your reluctant face, its sheer hatred, your narrow sky
how that too, so pure, collapses, the mended curtain
the sky, folds of velvet

I take a tentative step away from you, a step
that requires a long pause, consideration
carries you far. Farther still

farther
bird vetch, pine cone, forget-me-not, violet, conifer, grass, buttercup
man witnesses too much, pain, prediction, grief, but joy
a soap bubble climbing in the wind
I stand on the heath, and blow

JOSE MEETS CARMEN AT SUNRISE

All at once I can’t bear the sight of her, I can’t bear her anyway, she comes to me with hands smelling of flesh, drenched in the sun, and sees how I recoil. We have to put a stop to this, I say. And she simply throws herself on the bed and stays there. Her scent, of sand and skin and tobacco. And I clench my hands into fists, and I. We are a knife slicing through a splintered world, a spiral of deeds.

CARMEN SAYS WHAT SHE REALLY IS

You ask where I spent my night, you don’t
want to know, don’t ask.
I slithered with the snakes, many times
penetrated by words, I have almost burst.

Sequins in the clouds, love leads to tragedies
I understand sorrow but don’t know the play
The tight, wrong stitch of endings, ended by force.
Every movement, turns learned, the prompt’s support,
Repetition changes the structure, listen:

I am yours, yours, yours too. I scatter warmth over everything,
into anything, the mirror glow of the sun.
Though the human in me is lacking, my innermost
nothing but binary codes, strips of plastic, letters falling into the heat
smudges of ink, blood, splashes, still, don’t talk about a soul.

Rhythms, notes, pictures, hay, water
freedom, compulsion, language that only becomes real through singing.
Tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa.

JOSE AND ONE HOT DAY AMONG THE OTHERS

This is not real.
This is one hot day among the others.
The yellow flaking corner of the house, the grass faded in the sun’s glass
the dreamlike echo of footsteps on the pavement
as if we had lost that moment and were listening from outside.

This is not real.
When I thrust the knife into her stomach
I can feel her chest, her hill of Venus
her blood, its thick smell
it makes me dizzy
the knowledge that all blood smells the same.

This is not real.
This is more real than anything.
She flows towards me
and at this moment, at this very breath
she is mine more than anyone. Her hair is mine.
Her last whisper, her scream and prayer.
Her convulsing body, the tremble of her legs
as they trembled after making love
when everything became somehow uncontrollable
and I couldn’t make her stop, as she wept
and said that had forgotten to eat, that’s all.

This is not real.
The day is hot and fitful.
And I have a thought that slashes through the stage

warm gods
shale, fragments of roof, fragile tiles
a hot evening, a sandy wind
the girl has a soft step and there are stones on the path
shards whip up into her eyes, the swallows fly low
a black and damp smoke drops from the mountains
the sea casts everything in front of her
the dim rainbow descending from the sky
the jade-coloured stones, the tile with the drawing of a flower

the stone with writing upon it
the human in the way of others’ deeds
the sun that travels along outstretched arms

*) The poem ‘Carmen encounters Jose in the opulent jewellery store’ has been composed in such a way that the first three stanzas of the original poem have been translated (using online machine translators) via numerous different languages, then back into Finnish. The final poem is a reworking of these retranslated versions.

Translated by David Hackston

Ward A5, Thursday

The clouds in the nursing home corridors, sky-open springlike after a bathe
and forgotten, in a frayed blue dressing-gown beside an osiery.
The grannies in the nursing home corridors, the last beautiful pride
you keep in a small wooden box behind your forehead:
if the lid opens by accident all the things may drop to the floor
topsy-turvy you won’t be able to find them, your back won’t let you
you won’t recognise them any more even if you do,
the springtime tears your insides to pieces.
Here they come, the grannies.
Better to stay here indoors, the journey to the dining room is a rough one
exposed like this
a long way and all by sleigh.
You stare at the keyhole: the clouds are coming.

Ward A5, Saturday

Each morning the nurses pull on rubber boots and leave
for the dark dark, for a dark swamp, in the dark swamp
when the gnarled pines howl, only a pack of diapers for a lamp.
Cotton-grass on granddad’s head, violence and homesickness they leave
for the dark swamp, with all their sighs and strained nerves
along hands elbows into the bogholes. They bake cakes
and open the oven door into the night, to make it cheerful with the smell.
A prize would be nice, but the nurses aren’t on the winning side.

Ward A5, Sunday

I can milk the cows. You don’t need to bother about it at all.
Of course, it must be done at once. I’ll go and do it now.
You can have your coffee in peace, and take that medication.
Yes, I know how to milk, I’ll take your memory in my hands.
Although I am only a boy. Don’t worry, granny.
I can ask Leena to come with me, Leena has done a lot of milking.
You cry in perfect peace. I’ll milk those cows.

Yes.                                         The old woman tells me her tales of the seasons’ heartbeats. She tells me of rooms breathing through my tales, tells through the rooms and the breathing her stories of hips, joints, back. They are loosed and set free and they run outside, she lies under her quilt under her nightgown, as the tale’s end is beneath the tale. The stunned nursing home lies on the ground like a bird flown against the window. She picks it up in her wrinkled hands. She carries its pain like a dream of her own that belongs to no one else, in her voice the shadows of snowflakes collide lightly writing the garden, of shadows, of grass that whirling flowering darkens away, hidden in the grass a bird, hidden in the bird the wind I walk to the toilet to fetch water, the floor bears me as I walk, up to my knees in the dream.

Perhaps at this very moment your bed is freeing itself from its roots and clattering into the elevator, then down and outside to the shore of the lake. Sighing your bed plunges into the water. With calm strokes of all of its four legs your bed swims out to the middle. You notice that there’s a fishing rod beside you. You thought you had lost it seventy years ago, but apparently not! The float sinks below the surface, you are scared it will go all the way to your childhood, that a terrible, mighty bream will rise up, that your father will shout at you yet you won’t dare to strike the bream why is Dad still shouting pliable wriggling blood in the palms of your hands you go and hide under the covers. Even as you hide there, you know. That the rod is still jerking.  How could you not take a peek. You take one. The summer floods under the covers and you realise that it isn’t like that. A lake yes a lake is full of light. You grab the rod with both hands. It tugs the bed and you and everything else below the surface. Circles spread in the calm water. Would you like to go and brush your teeth or would you rather sink into the light with your bed?

A dark toilet. Dingy clotheshangers. Dingy woollen blanket. At least five water mugs in different parts of the room. A dent. A wisp of hair. A wind. A white, flameless candle. The door a wobbly  milk tooth. A crackling, a corridor. Blind stairs. Let loose.

Hilma is a lozenge box full of talk, rattles and rustling
to herself at the table.
One morning I went into her room: LOZENGE STORM

Always ready, always there.
All the way to cruelty, helplessness already.
She is a mere already.
Already.
Absolutely indeed. There she sits.
Stately as a plate of sausage soup.
On the prowl. Rushing motionless in her place
faster than the passing children,
a breakwater, a speechless heap of stones.
When we reach the shore, she trots willingly
towards us offers us her face:
a cleansed light framed by white hair,
thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thin,
thin, thin,
thin, thin, thin, thin,
thin, grannyice, covered in snow.

You are so pleased when I say to you Hello Erkki,  I give my hand into your hands.
Your eyes you old dented ice-hole angler.
Helplessly eager your nod when I ask if you play solitaire.
When I try to help you with the six-piece puzzle you’re quick to lose your temper.
The name of the creature in the puzzle is a horse. Yes, you say.
I paint out your ice-angling prize.
I paint out the suspenders in the wardrobe and the teeth in the mug.
I paint milk over everything I have drawn.
All that remains is the room smudged with white finger-paint
which breathes. You can go there, if you want.
You did.

He falls to the floor of his room. He falls to the floor of the shower. He falls on top of the nurse. He falls when he tries to open the door. He falls on a sharp corner. We carry them all to his bed. There he lies seeking a position for his pain. You had sat up in bed. I wanted to tell you that the world is beautiful, I even did. You sat on the mercy of your bed, looked out of the window. You said: ‘Yes, of course nature is there. Very close to me.’

Translated by David McDuff

Cup lichen

Luke 17:21

The lichen raised its fragile cup,
and rain filled it, and in the drop
the sky glittered, holding back the wind.

The lichen raised its fragile cup:
Now let’s toast the richness of our lives.

From Pohjajäätä [‘Ground-ice’], 1952)

A strange tapir

In Borneo, in Borneo,
in the forest dense and lush
there sleeps a stone
of reddish hue
content, ablush,
concealed, a-hush.

A strange tapir
(the bi-coloured one)
a wondrous tapir
(the many-toed one)
circles the tree, goes round and about,
a small word hangs from the tip of his snout.
Thus speaks the odd tapir
(the bi-coloured one):

I know that you are there
content and ablush,
I know that you are there
stone of reddish hue.
You are round, you are red,
like the fairy tale said.
No snout gets crushed
by a sleeping stone
of reddish hue,
content, ablush,
concealed, a-hush.
In the forest dense and lush
in Borneo, in Borneo.

The tightrope walker

Two summits rose up above the dark.
Between them,
taut as a bow’s arc
the walker’s rope is strung.
If you look into the dark, dizziness strikes.
You need to have brains of ice.

I see the summits, both ablaze.
Back and forth, back and forth!

(From Kuningas Kultatakki [‘King Goldcoat’], 1950]

A new game

Phenomena and circumstances toyed with me,
and so I said to them:
You have become really dull.
Now I will start to toy with things myself,
and when I grow weary,
I will go away.

I will find a new habitat.
God the Father asks me thoughtfully:
Where should I put you,
you who have been capable
of neither goodness nor badness.
Then I will say it to Him,
then I will say it:
Let’s play that new game now,
the one in which we are happy
and everywhere.

Ground-ice

My joy is made of ground-ice.
It does not melt.
A vein of water runs deep,
inexhaustible,
the spring shimmers
over my silver ice
clear as glass.

You see my ice.
Do not touch.
After all it is cold,
spring water.

Look.
You see a human face,
you see your own,
a good face.

In this life

I tell of an enduring summer,
streams that do not run out,
trees that do not shed their leaves,
land on which grass does not wilt.

In that land, the land of which I sing,
ravens fly, bringing food.
In that land, the land of which I sing,
there is always a hand for a human hand.

My friends, the chosen few,
I’m telling you
of truth’s enduring summer.

From Pohjajäätä [‘Ground-ice’], 1952)

The forest

I
Night swallowed day.
The forest was extinguished then.
Its green blackened,
and the empty paths
carried the day’s footprints
in their dreams
taking stopped time
into the morning.
But the wind got there first,
sounds rose.
The sleepy forest awoke,
not to sight,
not to light, to listen to itself
it ignited:
branches voiced their being,
treetops swished, leaves travelled,
not by means of tracks,
they moved only through sounds
from place to place
in the green of the shade,
hearing that which is truest
without the day.

II

In the morning, heaven’s weeping was visible:
its tear gleamed in the folds of leaves
like deepest pity,
which the day burns
when it begins a merciless heat,
a road through time.
The leaves twist and turn
and curl up with pain
when dust rains down
on the long road at whose end
evening’s sympathy is unchanging.

A fairy tale

A fairy tale is going round the forest:
A goblin child walks, a green scarf on her head,
and a harebell tinkles, a silver jingle.
At the places she touches with her hand, the grass revives,
the troll folk go into hiding  behind a tree stump.

A fairy tale is going round the forest in the guise of a goblin
the haircap moss is dewy and the hay is fragrant,
the white clover gives enough
nectar and gold-dust to the bumblebee.
The goblin eats nectar-bread and shares her joy
with the bumblebee.

Singing kettle

Singing kettle,
today you warmed my hand;
it was rigid from sleep,
numbed by morning.
Singing kettle,
why would a man
fail to meet amicably
the shape of a thing.

(From Päivästä päivään [‘From day to day’], 1954)

The mole sleeps,
spade-paw, velvet-fur
dreaming a dream, darkly soft

I would still give you
some small, dainty, green autumn poems
did you hear how the words
flowed
they were all like songs
each one sang one leaf
one leaf
as autumn blustered

(From Sanantuoja [‘The messenger’, posthumous, 1959. The last poem was dictated on 29 September, 1959. Helvi Juvonen died on 1st October.)

Little Bear’s winter dreams

‘Bon bons, bon bons.’ Little Bear inhaled air. ‘Bon bons, bon bons’. She dreamed of small suns and red spruce-cones. A bird had imprinted many small characters on the white snow, surely good and joyful, for they glittered like spring at the edges of the snowflakes.

When the sun returned, they would surely be living fairy tales in the forest. Until then, the forest was ruled by the bob-tailed, heavy-jowled Lynx Cat.

‘These are my own Northern Lights,’ Lynx Cat shrieked, arching her back. Then the whole of her fur crackled with multi-coloured sparks. ‘These are my own Northern Lights,’ Lynx Cat shrieked a second time and spat, for nobody in the forest was arguing.

‘Bon bons,’ Little Bear merely inhaled air.

Lynx Cat jumped off the tree and walked on the snow. Her paws imprinted round characters in the snow. Then the white witch came, pure gleaming white.

‘It’s time to rest now,’ she said and laughed. A playful whirlwind came directly and shook snow off the branches of many spruces.

‘Red cones, bon bons,’ Little Bear dreamed. Small suns shining quite golden on her fur. The same instant, her tummy started itching. She scratched her tummy and thought it was spring. ‘Bumblebees,’ she mumbled, ‘bumblebees are small bears who have been given wings. They eat honey drops. Honey drops are small, golden suns. They warm up your tummy. Bon bons, bon bons, I’ll lie this way round,’ Little Bear murmured, turning over at once. Then she began to snore and went on snoring till spring.

The snow melted and the bird sang: ‘Spring! Spring’s here!’

‘Spring,’ said the green goblin wife, who walked round the forest carrying a bunch of flowers to see if everything was all right.

‘Spring,’ Lynx Cat shrieked and snatched some cat’s-foot from the goblin wife’s hand with one of her sharp claws.

‘Spring,’ Little Bear yawned. The goblin wife had thrown bear’s-garlic at her and she realised she was squinting at the sun.

‘Yes, spring, isn’t it something of a miracle,’ the green goblin wife laughed, and in her laughter rang the harebells of all summers, small hare’s-foot stretched out and blackberries ripened. Lynx Cat laughed so hard that her beard trembled.

But Little Bear stared, matted and bemused, for her wits had been left under the cover of the forest. ‘Bon bons,’ she said and slapped herself, and then all was well.

Pincio

In November, the soul in a human being curls up to sleep for the winter and has nightmares, in the meantime, the joyless body does what it can during the short grey days. But just think: in early April someone will find the first blue anemone of the spring. Is that not wonderful? To find a blue anemone after all that winter. Does it seem incredible to you, too. And the sea has melted. Soon you can have a bunch of flowers. Wildflowers, which you can take to someone as a sign of spring, if you have anyone to take them to.

(From Pikku Karhun talviunet [‘Little Bear’s winter dreams’, 1974; fragments and fairy-tales, collected and edited by Mirkka Rekola. Little Bear is Juvonen’s  fairy-tale self-portrait.)

Translated by Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah

Let the cows out on Monday
and they’ll enter the forest, wander far
aim for the waterfalls, the hole in the rock and down the precipice.
The dead come back along our the road to our yard:
Rebecca, Isolde, Rosamunda.
Allison, Eulalia, Euphrosyne.
Not as ghosts but as old friends.
Whom will they, the wingless ones, protect here?
A lean lass, a lean lass.

it’s our job to keep an eye on  which cow jumps on which
                so we know that one's on heat
                                               but I always forget which one

in the evenings my cows queue up in pairs
          Minea’s milked dry
                         Anastasia falls into a ditch
Medeia collapses
                             Penelope swells, Angelica’s pestered with flies
and Thetis with a straitjacket
                  Aphrodite’s udders turn mincemeat
                                                          Diana’s jump falls short
              All heroines are not saveable
but the wrathy Wonder Woman rushes off to town with reddled lips,
                                                               milk-yard gate on her back,
And when you see her at Stockmann’s department store
                                                   she’s no longer saying hello

Anne’s christened Princess but reigning’s a hard job.
In summer Princess A flees to the forest with three bulls,
a crazy July, nobody can catch them, they’ve got spies and a house in a tree.
In the autumn a neighbour says: your cow’s head’s stuck in the barn door,
she’s run in there, can’t shift forward or backward.
It’s a change of place for Princess A.
In her later years she works in a development co-operation
and fights against land mines. Princess A is learning how to wave
on the red carpet her gaze lights up goes out, disappears, lights up again
a wild-strawberry scent, sensitive to light, inescapable and threatened.

When the others rush through the thickets
the golden-brown cow follows me through the small trees,
doesn’t leave the path. Holly Golightly’s from an ancient breed, thin and light,
sometimes I fear she’ll go with the thunder, be forgotten in the rain,
take the storm on top of her fragile shoulder blades out of sheer sibling-love.
When she disappears into the swamp, her call rises out of the fog, from the cotton grass
the hopeful song of a cow, her trust in me never fails for a moment.
Holly follows humming, comes round every bend with me towards home.
that’s what she wants, that’s what she’s made for, I don’t know why I’m crying.

I do know I can’t go away from these.
At least not silently.
When I cycle up the hill
they run to the fence.
At night when I return and whisper tender words
I’m answered from the darkness.
Why, yesterday they kept hoovering the pasture with loose ankles
smoked a pipe the whole day
Pamela, Priscilla, Pinetree.
Everyone has to have someone who remembers.

Queenie’s back was white as driven snow,
stars glowed on her brow and shoulders.
I fall on my knees with longing.
What raises me up is Queenie’s command,
merciless and therefore full of comfort.
When Queenie’s giving milk we talk about the thirst for life,
what we can’t control:

JOY! JOY! JOY! What you can’t command you can ask for
JOY! JOY! JOY! What you can’t hide
you must ask for more of, in order to carry on

Queenie’s voice echoes in the empty cowshed
the call of the driven-through-the-ages bellwether,
I’ll even walk through the walls
if what leads me is good.

Translated by Herbert Lomas

Poems from Yö aukeaa kuin vilja (‘The night opens like corn’, Tammi, 1978)

Of his early childhood, Hamlet really only remembered his father’s slightly crooked and gnarled index finger, pointing at the lowest branch of a holly oak. A small owl sat on it. It can’t see anything, it’s asleep now. It won’t fly off until night. These were the only words Hamlet remembered his father saying to him during the first six years of his life. Later, all he saw of his father was his back, bent over in study of agricultural conditions in a village called Jawohl or of waterside traffic on the river Vistula at the turn of a particular century. When it came to governmental matters, the king placed his trust chiefly in his unconscious and in wheat bread, thick white slices of which he devoured from the moment he awoke.

On long, silent winter days, when his father immersed himself in additional studies or demonstrations of learning, Hamlet would shut himself up in his room in order to rewrite history. He colonised countries and swapped their locations. At one stage he even thought of making the sun rise in the West and America encounter Columbus, but he restrained himself. He decided to forget certain dates completely; others, he turned upside down. He made Napoleon beat Blücher at Waterloo, and, lengthily and earnestly, he researched mercantilism from an eel’s point of view. He proved the part fescue grass had, via a certain hen and the protein and vitamins it produced, in ensuring Alfred Nobel’s name was inscribed in the annals of history. After that, he was inspired to praise the character of fescue grass, how it was humbly passed from field to dunghill by hand, like a string bag. He spiced up his history by means of short tales, like that of a certain female personage in St Petersburg who happened to peer into the secrets of Russian cuisine, which were then transported to Denmark in her apron pocket.

The Danish winter cannot be compared to anything, except perhaps the English one. It is a vast, icy baton that travels through fog, and the fog is so thick that you could cut it into pieces and store it on cellar shelves. In autumn, when the morning mist became dense and fell, splashing, on to the leaves of the trees and the ground, when the sunlight was pure honey, and leaves hopped like sparrows on the earth, the king began to manifest ever increasing symptoms of irritation. Trigeminal-nerve problems attacked the left side of his face in fiery, increasingly frequent waves.

Although he was a man in his place, although he had a hoof in his heart, his trousers began to hang regressively in the winter months, his ice-blue eyes to fade into colourlessness, like old blotting paper. Every morsel of food brought pain, occasionally he had to get up mid-meal and bang his head against the wall. He wandered night in, night out from room to room, he scarcely glanced at the queen.

Since there seemed to be no cure, the royal family’s personal physician asked if he could drill a hole in the king’s temple and take a peek at what was really going on in there. As to the outcomes of this operation, he presented two sure-fire alternatives: definitive removal of the pain and at the least a more or less mild form of unilateral facial paralysis, or death. The king refused absolutely.

During one routine check the doctor had indeed established that a hoof had grown in the king’s heart. This had actually happened in early manhood. Madame Queen had a drop-shaped but otherwise normal heart, or so-called ‘drop heart’, and a high, narrow palate like a church’s vault, which meant that her heartbeats echoed there. When the queen opened her mouth, it sounded like she had a clock underneath her tongue.

During the turbulent years of his youth, the doctor married a Polish dancer who had refused to utter a single word to anyone for the past thirty years. So the doctor spent the best part of his time on the table at his practice, listening to the workings of his gall bladder, conversing with his pancreas and liver. In this way, he had progressed so far in his profession that he was able to say what ailed someone before he or she had even crossed the floor to shake his hand.

He was a benign person who had gone through a lot, and because he and his silence-embracing wife had not been blessed with a single heir, he loved the royals like they were his own children. The king’s roars, an electric-blue curtain, sped along the corridors to his room, they belonged to winter like Northern lights in Arctic regions.

That meant that a new morning had begun. In his room, Hamlet pulled on dark-blue velvet trousers and buttoned up his dark-blue velvet jacket. Every morning he looked in the rippling mirror, with its dim surface, and combed his ash-blond hair from the front to the side, then backwards from the sides, and the last thing he always saw on the surface of the mirror was his round, nut-brown eyes.

The queen generally got up last. She sat in her bed and with the help of a hand-mirror carried out the painful daily ritual of finding the beauty spot that had disappeared. It was her pride and her adornment, but it had a bad habit of moving of its own accord. If, in the evening, it had been on the left cheek, then the following day it could be located on the shoulder, the neck, the sole of the foot or on the other cheek.

On Sundays, and sometimes also on weekdays, the royal family, along with Polonius and Ophelia and a group of Hamlet’s friends, made riding excursions to nearby oak- and beech-woods. The queen rode a shining black pony called Paul, whose mane and tail dragged on the ground. In tall grass, the pony disappeared totally from view, and the queen looked as if she were wading up to her waist through an emerald-green sea of grass.

In general, the members of the royal family interacted with each other in a friendly and cheerful way, as tundra wolves do with other members of the pack. But on riding excursions, the king could not tolerate the sight of Hamlet and ordered the latter to remain as far behind as possible. Hamlet sat on his saddle dangling the reins, his feet sticking outwards, and stared unseeing at the landscape that opened up between the horse’s ears. The horse, for its part, played now the tired spinner-woman, deliberately stumbling, and now the flax-weeder in the field, when it stood on its knees in a ditch.

And yet the prince was five when he was first lifted on to a saddle. There he had to sit, now facing the direction of travel, now the opposite way. He had to learn how to jump on to a horse’s back from behind, using the hindquarters for support and the gambrels as a spring-board. He had to learn how to stand on the saddle during all gaits, as well as how to fall from horseback at full gallop without injury. In general, exercises had begun early in the morning, when, first of all, two bucketfuls of ice-cold water were poured over the boy. Gymnastic activities followed, with various exercises for in between. In winter, these were replaced by cycle-rides over furrowed fields that were frozen rock-hard; according to the king, this activity strengthened internal organs and improved balance.

Hamlet strode in the cold wind; it tried to tear off his short jacket, which was blotchy with wear. Wet scraps of leaves flew in the wind, along with all manner of small objects. The shore’s sand was grey and dull like a shroud. In summer, when the sea finally warmed up, the sand glowed like white-gold, it shifted and glittered and carried with it the eggs of seabirds, whole nests with chicks, heaps of reeds, dried starfish, seashells hollowly sighing, and now and then some seafarer, swollen out of recognition. Among the populace it had sometimes been rumoured that baby Moses had been washed up just here, on this coast, and not into the reeds of the Nile. The people solved the mystery of shooting stars by believing that having fallen, the stars hid under the eyelids of a drowning person, to become replacement eyes, so that those who had perished could see to walk in the kingdom of death.

*

Oh, sorrow. In a night-blue dressing-gown, hems adorned with heavy, silver-coloured braid, Hamlet looked more distant, ever lonelier, ever paler. He was a star hurled into space, he travelled his course without a backwards glance. The murmur of strange tongues in his ears, the everlasting flame of love in his breast. Forehead like a snowy Alpine precipice; arm, in its slenderness, like underwater coral, independent music, detached from the body.

From January to January the colonel smokes cigarettes, cigarettes by the dozen, and in between a couple of panatelas. He walks in the upstairs rooms, he wanders in them as on summer nights and listens to the snow singing in the cellars. January is made of thin paper and apples, January smiles from every nook and cranny, and the colonel smiles back. January comes, with armfuls of medals and flower-baskets, it shoes the horses and shoots the hares. One of them is ready and willing, and hangs from the wall of the cowshed, its ears like folded sheets of paper. The hares, those small forest shrubs, are bundled up and taken away and January covers January like a napkin. In January, heaven holds dances, in January boy-children and butterflies are born. In January, the organ of autumn finally falls silent and the road is trodden only by moon and dog, that old soulless fisher who has never been told where the steps are that lead to heaven. January is also a serenade to a beautiful lady whose gaze is always muddled by sleep, but the colonel doesn’t know that. He sleeps, the sleepless one, dreaming that he is finally asleep and the lump of sugar in his glass sinks through the steaming tea towards the heart of the earth. The night carries the sleepless colonel and the sugar-lump on its shoulders and through the door there comes January, along with thousands of Januaries.

In cold seasons, blue tits erupt on the branches like warm fluffy flowers. This is the village of cherry blossom and cherries, which the birds cover at intervals like a vast dark wave, whose open field the falcon guards. This is Emilia’s village, hers, who long ago was lovely and sought-after, and Emil’s, who owned the finest peony shrub in the land. And the village of mad horses and of Paul, who shod them, and Kalle and Verner, dyed-in-the-wool horsemen and dead, the pair of them. Only the ancient staff officer is missing, who would fly alongside the greenly billowing corn-field, like an iron angel with flaring trouser legs. He would be as eternal as his bicycle, and if he were Socrates or indeed anyone and cycled with a fox under the hem of his shirt, his expression not wavering, saluting, then he would ride straight into a ditch at the former co-op. Or there would be a few horses running loose and a couple of old women watering them or even a curse which would rise up from deep within the forest meadow. But all the same, work and love are forgotten, joy and sorrow. There is nothing but the gold of the evening which flows from branches into the water, the cry of the falcon and the peony, flaming sun-like. And windows that are slowly covered by the cream-coloured blossom of the honeysuckle.

A poor dog has little to give to the moon. No luggage, no lighted rooms, no compartments hidden in the heart. It has only its heart. Only a bark, long and narrow like a tunnel, released from its brown muzzle. Like a small abandoned ice-cube it echoes from shore to shore. Strange, how the heart can be carelessly left behind in bed-linen, on long, endless streets, in dust behind curtains or in a glass, like teeth. Dogs ceased talking and received in place of a mouth an inky line, but man lost his heart, his ear can no longer pick out songs from inside a tree. He  swears criss-cross on his heart, he thinks it’s a distant island, or then he looks for it in his trousers; in many, the heart looks like a bottom and vice versa. But in dogs it is where it should be: just after the muzzle, boulder-like, baby-faced and willing.

Night, and stars side by side, enormous pieces of metal swaying above the alders. Trees and endless music and a bridge, against whose railing the young poet leant his coughing frame. You can still hear his short, gasping breath above the water. His brother fell from the sky like a bird, a bomb under his arm, into the midst of flowering July. A little after that or before it his sister, roses and all, was taken away from him. But the waters do not forget her, nor does the light, nor the faithful trees. Soon he too was nothing but pallid grass, dimly visible against the light, bending and bending as the wind played the short life that was given him. He wrote of the lake and of the light lingering over the lake, of the gulf which flows from far away in the past, passing generations. The heart had to travel in its bony cage for so many days and nights before finally it was free. Yet another small mysterious poem burst from his lips as he bent down over the trees, the light, the water. A small song like grass, like flowing water, like light, which rang out, rang out.

A small pine looks out from the thicket with coal-black eyes, stones sing hymns on the hillside. A tiny angel lives inside each of us, longing for a home of its own, and loneliness enfolds us as it does the woodland creature. It cannot be taken from us, nor the creature from the forest. Everywhere fields have curled up to sleep; the ant-track, the ant, and the fragile bird-bones are sleeping against the heart of the island. Trees have the snowy faces of ancestors, and on the road where dogs walk in their wind-blasted trousers, silence eats itself like silk. I play the typewriter, appassionata, where has everyone gone? Where were you at the time of the first snow, where now, when there’s nothing but snow all around, soon we’ll descend through the ice ages towards the final darkness. I leaf through the history of soil-covered poets with sooty fingers. A humbug my pillow, I listen to the hares peeling apple-trees at night, and in the morning, in the whiteness of the earth and the sky, a green woodpecker flies like a poor man’s field.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah (with Fleur Jeremiah)

Poems from Jumalan sumu (‘God’s mist’, WSOY, 2009)

SANTO PAN

These mornings when beggars
station themselves at church doors
and a little grace slips through
the fingers of some of us,
it seems for a moment good

That crows are flying about
and princes’ bones are clattering in huge sarcophagi

And now, with a basic shape planned
for the daily bread,

Early morning wakes up in Florence
with black flour in its fingernails

IF ONE LIVED

If one lived as a fakir
with spiky binary bits for a mattress
and some theory for a pillow
or a footnote under the bed,
or if one lived in thought,
shadowed by the brain’s convolutions
as in one’s gazebo of lilacs
with a glass of bubbling Hegel on the table
and Wittgenstein as one’s straw

or as a nail half-driven into a cross
and one lived one’s moment under the hammer
in the heat before
being forgotten in the depths of the tree
or as a rock on the shore, in a slow trance
making one see the horizon
rock like a swing
and the Pacific Ocean turn into a sand storm

or if one lived in the world’s flesh, in swarming cells
while fast-flowing bloody rivers
streamed hotly
towards the Niagara of the heart.

If one read the Bible –
and while rolling a fag
against the smoky stoneface of mental imagery
one grated on some verse

and dived into the misty psalmody
as if inside one’s bottle
to grope for one’s soul

If one lived on one’s will, towards
something better, always merely towards!
and how would one fulfill that will?
When the wind blows over the drawing table
a white paper remains

Or if one lived in one’s memory, in images
on the pages of an album
and found trust in the fact that
everything was gone,
everything was gone

or if one wandered asking nothing, with a bundle on one’s back
and a couple of words from a passer-by, the same
one could utter to him

Here we came under the stars
and the sky’s an accident,
and if your head’s in the stars, your feet
are solidly in their dust

THE FOREST

The image of man oxidized, the old paint is flaking off
Hopes were taken away, the holiness of dream
                                    was stamped to its knees with money
Now dreams, ghosts on fields of asphalt,
are harrowing up whirlwinds,
and beyond comprehension and bread
a hundred radio channels are broadcasting

Two people alone
              blest with their happiness
wander in the woods

and the black horns of plenty, they belong
to the holiest of holies

SINGING MASTER

My funeral was by no means
a quiet affair
but was celebrated in an unbelievably messy and literally
cacophonous sniffing, slurping
and shuffling, and even though
it was spring, that yearly rock bottom
for allergics, there were in fact
such tarred lungs and crapulosity there
as I’d never have expected
from those bright-eyes at school Christmas parties.
And if hymn-singing is bawling, is it
singing? No it isn’t. The difference between bawling and singing is
in the ending, and there’s no end to bawling, at least
not in the world I’ve left behind.
Song however goes on to its exalting end
with a beautiful balance, and one certainly doesn’t stand
open-mouthed, yowling at the woodshed corner.
I’ve always found a challenge
in Melartin’s The First of May, the one where
Larin-Kyösti ends every stanza with the words ‘so that
this song will ring out in heaven’s lofts!’
Good Lord! There’s certainly not going to be anything in heaven
comparable to a shingle-roofed building,
and if there is, with one mixed choir
and two time-beats I’ll sort it
into functionalism.

TO MAKE LOVE AND DIE

Day by day we’re growing old.
                                    It’s sweet, restful
You brew ginger tea,
           and I splash some Amontillado in
And so we’re able to make love
                             all this morning too

Yes, yes, you do remind me,
                                  our pulsebeats come from the forests
From fields, riverbanks and meadows
                    windblown from wood, stone and fruit
                                      the waves of our skin
raise their moments on the foam of desire

And today too as if on the very last day
                               for those seconds
          we’re always making love

Translated by Herbert Lomas

Poems from Lust (‘Desire’, Söderströms, 2008), translated by David McDuff and David Hackston
A Finnish translation, by Jyrki Kiiskinen, is entitled Ajan meno (WSOY, 2008)

(easter)

Despite the prognoses of the Earth's imminent warming
today April 8 it is cold enough to make one’s teeth chatter

In a few weeks I will turn seventy, my ninth grandchild
  August (Siiri's younger brother)
was born two months ago and the tenth is on the way

I hope it all goes well! I was elected to Parliament two
  weeks ago as the Left Alliance candidate  in the constituency of Uusimaa
with 9,346 votes. Thank you! 

In one way it must have been easier to live a hundred
  years ago, when news reporting was still slow and inadequate. Today 

when we have millions of eyes and ears scattered across the globe
we are forced to be there and take part in it all live 

As soon as the machete cuts the children's
necks in Rwanda their heads roll across
the carpets of our living room. When the tsunami approaches

we are already inside the screen ready to flee up
  the mountain. And when the 22-year-old young man at
the university in Virginia kills 32 fellow students with his
automatic pistol our wallpaper is stained
with their blood and the desolate
mothers are already weeping outside our door. We cope with it

up to a certain limit, and then we switch off. But it continues
and repeats itself with a lunatic persistence in our dreams 

My ailments I consort with as with secret mistresses,
one is called Diabetica, another Claudicatio
More I will not reveal to you, vultures, hyenas
  with pricked-up ears! 

I find it difficult to remember names (at a dinner, I was supposed
  to give the speech of thanks about my favourite poet
Henrik Nordbrandt but could not remember his name) 

I love to play jazz on my Yamaha grand piano, Monk,
  Ellington, Bill Evans, some tunes of my own,
then I forget everything else. I float despite my being overweight 

When I hear horn music my tears begin to flow. Seven
years ago I underwent two bypass operations, the
  second was successful

I have six children, all grown up, by three different women
  All the grandchildren as well
Having been living for 36 years with my partner who is a psychiatrist and good
         at many things, including flowers and family therapy 

We live in a large, empty house with many windows.
I read medicine at university and became a doctor in 1962

the same year that I debuted as a poet with the slim volume
  Ventil where I wrote:
‘Caught in the net of material things man has forfeited the possibility

of light. The spider of unhappiness has an appetite for his soul.
  Bon appetit’
It is easy to be ironic when you have everything    

Much of what we know is not possible to
imagine. Like the abduction and murder of children to sell
  their organs for transplants 

Like the attack on a foreign country and the killing of
  hundreds of thousands of people
to secure one’s own nation's energy supply 

Like the suicide bomber’s desperation and contempt for his own life
  and those of others
The obesity that takes as many lives as famine or even more

Like the belief in violence as a solution to the problem of violence 

The list of the things one neither can nor wants to understand
becomes an endless Via Dolorosa. It is Easter and on television 

we see Christ on the cross turned into a bloody lump of
  minced meat
under Mel Gibson’s cruel direction, perhaps one should not  

portray all the evil, as Coetzee says in Elisabeth Costello
and why describe the torture, the  suffering, the pain, if we
  can do nothing
to prevent them? Today is
  Easter Sunday

Christ is risen and the exultation roars through the wonderful
  Easter cantatas of Bach and Pergolesi.
The children have been for Easter dinner, we have
eaten mutton stew and drunk red wine, on television they are claiming that Christ’s tomb has been
  found

There are too many questions and too few answers 

The conservatives won the elections so we have larger class differences, more
  rich and poor
more policemen, guards, Alsatians, violence and charity 

Bismarck knew that social peace can be guaranteed only
  by means of a fair social policy.
Also we who are rich go astray when we no longer
  belong anywhere 

I am not a religious person but I find our destiny
  figured
in Easter’s ethnic cleansing and vicarious suffering 

What is the freedom that so captivates us? Is the freedom
  to restrict the freedom of others
the only thing we are prepared to kill and die for? 

The grain of wheat bears fruit when it dies, what ceases
  continues
Take me, drink me, eat me, become those I have loved
  and always love

(use it or lose it)

Use it or lose it
Take the muscles in your arms and legs
Take the laughter muscles and the crying muscles
Take the stomach muscles
One day they are gone
Or take thoughts
If you stop thinking you will soon have none left
Or  teeth if you stop chewing
The same is true of the emotions
If you stop feeling they will waste away and wither
Until one day they are gone
First you are unfeeling then cold
  then insensible
One day you stand there shouting: Heil who?
Friendship too wastes away  if you do not
  use it
Not to speak of hatred bitterness
  jealousy and envy
You will end up being very lonely
What will you do then without your old
  favourites?
With desire and sex it is the same
Unused they will shrink and wither away
If you don’t use your love
  it will die
It becomes real in action which is its ex libris in our hearts
Unemployed it disappears forever
What we don’t use uses us up, we early used-up ones

(I write a poem)

I write a poem
I write that I breathe and you breathe
I write that this evening it is raining
I write that the neighbour’s cat is sitting on the back steps
  licking its nose
Where have all our field mice gone?
I write that three-year-old Siiri is looking at the cat and
  licking her lips
I write that the continental shelves are jutting 3.7 centimetres
  into one another
I write that a great hand
I write that I want to stay that I
  long to be gone
I write about everyone and about no one in particular
I write about us who have loved you who will always
  love you
I write a poem
I write that I breathe that you breathe

Translated by David McDuff

(episodes)

This book is about… well, what actually?
Don’t eat the menu… you little rascal
Eats only living beings… er-hum? I seem to have
  a cockroach in my throat
Hit me hard on the back, please. Thanks

Can you feel it burning too…?
Sorry… my eyes are so light-sensitive I daren’t look
  at all

Can I ask you a question: who am I?
Damn it! And who do you think you are asking me such a
  bloody quest …
No, my dear! Don’t look at me like that!

Have you noticed there are cameras all over the place?
Like aphids or crab lice or
Comforting to know that you’re not
  entirely alone

The walls over there… aren’t they like… some sort of
  eyes?
There are cameras with fax and pix and what have you
Nowadays nothing is destroyed rather everything
  is saved for future interrogations

The new constitution smacks of… dare I even say it?
The choice between polonium and a bullet in the neck?
We simply use the words freedom of choice

Did you see on the telly how his head just sort of came off
… the fucking tyrant
So you mean that the real murderers…?
  For the love of Jesus… boom boom
It’ll be the peace prize as usual, I take it?

Nothing surprises me any longer… psst!... someone
  is moving in the zone
For Christ’s sake… now we’ve got them! What shall we do?
  Aim? Pretend nothing’s happening?
Shoot?

Translated by David Hackston

Violet dusks

Violet dusks I bear within me from my origins,
naked maidens at play with galloping centaurs...
Yellow sunlit days with gaudy glances,
only sunbeams do true homage to a tender woman’s body...
The man has not come, has never been, will never be...
The man is a false mirror that the sun’s daughter angrily
                                   throws against the rock-face,
the man is a lie that white children do not understand,
the man is a rotten fruit that proud lips disdain.

Beautiful sisters, come high up on to the strongest rocks,
wer are all warriors, heroines, horsewomen,
eyes of innocence, heavenly foreheads, rose larvae,
heavy breakers and birds flown by,
we are the least expected and the deepest red,
stripes of tigers, taut strings, stars without vertigo.

Beauty

What is beauty? Ask every soul –
beauty is every overflow, every glow, every overfilling
                                   and every great poverty;
beauty is to be faithful to the summer and to go naked unto the autumn;
beauty is the plumage of the parrot or the sunset that bodes storms;
beauty is a sharp feature and an accent of one’s own: it is I,
beauty is a great loss and a silent funeral procession,
beauty is the fan’s light beat that wakes the breeze of destiny:
beauty is to be as voluptuous as the rose
                                   or to forgive everything because the sun is shining;
beauty is the cross the monk chose or the necklace
                                   of the lady has from her lover,
beauty is not the thin sauce in which poets serve themselves,
beauty is to wage war and seek happiness,
beauty is to serve higher powers.

Two goddesses

When you saw the face of happiness you were disappointed:
that sleeping woman with loose features,
she was the most worshipped and the most often named,
the least known of all goddesses,
she who reigned over the becalmed seas,
the flowering gardens, the endless days of sunlight,
and you resolved never to serve her,

Nearer again to you with depth in her eyes again trod pain,
the never invoked,
the best known and least understood of all goddesses,
she who reigns over the stormy seas and the sinking ships,
over the life prisoners,
and over the heavy curses that rest with the child in the mother’s womb.

Pain

Happiness has no songs, happiness has no thoughts, happiness has nothing.
Smash your happiness in pieces, for happiness is evil.
Happiness comes softly with the morning’s murmuring in sleeping thickets,
happiness glides away in light cloud-pictures over deep-blue deeps,
happiness is the field asleep in the glow of midday
or the sea’s infinite expanse in the bask of vertical rays,
happiness is powerless, she sleeps and breathes and knows of nothing…
Do you know pain? She is strong and great with secretly clenched fists.
Do you know pain? She smiles hopefully with eyes swollen from weeping.
Pain gives us all that we need –
she gives us the keys to the kingdom of death,
she pushes us in through the gate while we still hesitate.
Pain baptises the child and awakes with the mother
and forges all the golden wedding rings.
Pain rules over all, she smooths the thinker’s brow,
she fastens the necklace around the neck of the desired woman,
she stands in the doorway when the man leaves his true love…
What more does pain give her darlings?
I know no more.
She gives pearls and flowers, she gives songs and dreams,
she gives us a thousand kisses that are all empty,
she gives us the only kiss that is real.
She gives us our strange souls and curious likings,
she gives us all life’s highest gains:
love, solitude, and the face of death.

Translated by David McDuff

Published in Complete poems. Edith Södergran (Bloodaxe Books, 1984, 1992), edited and translated by David McDuff

In the emptiness

When we were children. We went to sleep in our father’s and mother’s bed. I got father’s sweaty side. You got mother’s fragrant blankets. We dreamed pale green spherical cloud dreams in wrought-iron beds and burnt our fumbling paws on the red-hot shade of the night light. We did not know. That this downy softness wouldn’t last. The rooms were always large and the big people were big and there was no sin. In the course of one day you managed millions of things and the sun took the lake down with it. These are facts, and the teddy-bear hospital was overcrowded. I stand behind these facts. Behind me a cello is playing. It feels lonely. There was a lot of chocolate and sharing, shopmobiles and tall spruce trees that father, when he was young, climbed all the way to the top of, because he was unable to fall, then.

Now I enter that forest and don’t give names to anything. Invisible, I walk on the pine needle carpet, shouting now and again to see if someone here would recognise me as their own.

Would lay down their work and see me.

Das Kind!

To Dzherassa Gappoyeva (January 1st, 1998 – September 3rd, 2004)

Beslan

Bring water,
I am thirsty.
Bring tear water too,
sprinkle salt water both sides of the roadblock.
Bring a bright flower.
Bring Coca-Cola, I am thirsty.
I am an ordinary pampered baby,
stuck out my tongue at you in the morning.
My hair looks untidy,
draw the ribbon tight.
Straighten my frilly collar,
it mustn’t dangle today.
I’m a calf that was pulled out by its hooves,
you’ll never forget that passage.
You almost fainted when I kicked you.
Phlegmy and bloody
I fell away from you.
Bring water,
bring a bright flower,
bring Coca-Cola.
I am your child,
I am the girl in the frilly blouse and flowers in my hair.
I am a child forever.
But do you know, mother,
so are all the children of all other mothers.
Even when grown up, forever children to their mothers.
Touch the red granite with your hand.
Is it cold?
The sun has been blazing all day.
So the granite must be warm now.
Warm and smooth it is.
You bring water, you bring a flower, you bring Coca-Cola.
The night will be clear.
I am blue smock flower hair girl,
I am holding balloons in my hands.
There were stars on the ceiling of the gym.

Bliss illumination

A long time has passed since Gretel and Hansel’s childhood, epochs and views have changed, the great deep forest has been felled. Replaced, now, by radio towers, paved roads, ski lifts. What comes to mind now may be just some Entwood, they can no longer remember their own forest. The nature path through skinny new growth starts in the car park, Rammstein plays on the car radio. Wearing woolly hats with sponsors’ logos on them they walk on a gravel path across a clearcut area. Gretel and Hansel seek out, separately, certain kinds of non-places, dead zones. Motorways, abandoned wastelands, construction sites, patches of natural growth, urban pastures.

Could one construct a lean-to here, spend the night, lost?

The witch reminisces

No one looks at a mirror in this sort of life situation, said the witch. I had a mouldy two-room apartment and in it that idle loser, three brats, and as a bonus, Oma and Opa. All in the same efficient square footage.

No looking at a mirror. Just stink. And if one should happen to look, by mistake, all you can see in it is just more progeny. It’s a hallucination. It’s the future. It’s what’s coming.

When I gave birth to my fourth child, they gave me my own room in hospital. There was a mirror in the room. What did I see? In the mirror I saw a young girl with black hair. She had bare feet. We smelled good. We were alone. We were hungry.

Gretel and Hansel II

There were just the two of us.

There was no one else.

Just the forest and us.

There was a faint path that didn’t lead anywhere.

Not home, not to the gingerbread house.

There were adjectives: dense, sombre, thick, similar.

You and I, dense similars.

Your hand, dry and warm

in my hand.

Our distress shared and not to be uttered out loud.

We were just the two of us, and mute,

and it was wonderful.

Gretel and Hansel III

In any case, I trusted you,

always and forever.

Do you know what it’s like to trust another,

always and forever?

I don’t know. If you’re a big brother in the middle of a forest,

abandoned by your parents,

you probably don’t think very highly of your little sister.

Nor do you then, I suppose, trust anyone

always or forever.

Nevertheless, I tell you:

you should trust me always and forever.

I’m the only one in this forest who knows you.

Hansel:

As grown-ups we didn’t talk about all that very often. But we did not forget our father’s mistake, his two blunders. The gingerbread house encysted itself in us. I don’t know if Gretel spent time on some trauma couches, I certainly didn’t.

There were times when we got drunk and talked and bawled until five in the morning. Reminisced about everything and cackled about it. Bone! Was that witch ever stupid! Blind and dumb, sniffed things with her big schnozz but didn’t notice anything.

Gretel poured some coffee liqueur in her drink and confessed, looking guilty, that there were times when she missed all that, the milk and the pancakes, the apples and the nuts. That gourmandising. And those windows that were made of pure sugar.

Gretel:

Once, and only once, we hugged each other on the balcony on a cold night. At that time we were so tall that we weren’t growing anymore, we had pay slips and study report books and our own refrigerators. It happened after Hansel had found a new one and divorced the old one. We squeezed each other in the dark and forgot all snow-white birds. Sick, Hansel said, when he let go of me. No it’s not, said I.

*

After Gretel had killed the witch, we mooched hither and yon in that paralysed forest. Finally we reached a shore. It was on a lake, not by any sea. (The seas had to wait. We were a forest people and still are.) I was ready to throw in the towel. Who would now attempt to build a bridge? Or a boat?

Look, a white duck, Gretel shouted. In her typical fashion, she started to make up a poem.

‘Little duck, little duck, dost thou see,

Hansel and Gretel are waiting for thee.

There’s never a plank, or bridge in sight,

take us across on thy back so white.’

The duck swam towards us. I sat on its back and left some room in front of me. Gretel disagreed. It can’t carry both of us at once, she said. We have to make separate trips.

Well, I did see that it couldn’t carry both of us. It felt terrible to stay there alone on the silent shore. I would have liked to go with her. Even at the risk of our falling.

Translated by Anselm Hollo