Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

From Kiven vaitiolo (‘The stone’s silence’, Tammi, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz

I buried you
    in an onion field 
the way to take care of a love whose stems 
suddenly rupture, tubes break
   the earth's covered by 
chickweed, goose foot and red-veined 
leaves of sorrel, deep down 
the inflamed wound, as sand that glints 
in the soil, underground 
golden domes and weeping under the crust
    I tear 
with dry hands the green and you do not hear 
    because you are cry and dirt 
and onion and God and a man who's been thought
   into the ground 
and the sun is wise and hot, underground 
the trees' root systems are fishing
    for strength
there is enough left for a sigh

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 Poems from Verkko (‘The net’, WSOY, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz

The descent

Down the stairs, out through the gate into the street
and you wonder
what the cobblestones had in mind
with the waves that beat
and the rock that was humbled
smooth in the course of millennia.
Streetcars would rumble
toward them with ancient god force.
Now the stones lie there quietly like
fish blown ashore
petrified by the sun.
Their memory is short. Steel is mute.
The rails remember Kallio, remember Töölö.
Words are thinner than they used to be;
they’ve been walked over too many times.
The city. more glabrous, no longer stretches
algae-covered tentacles to the gates of Babylon.
Like an animal with a premonition, the city pulls its soft parts
inside a calcareous shell, does its work there in secret.
Much has disappeared: no more twitching tectonic plates
brought on by words, no electric storms in the bowels.
Coffee is the measure of violence: no more tobacco
in whose smoke one could heal loneliness and the world.
As before, you look through glass, just a thin glass,
at the sidewalk and trees facing the restaurant. A man
is pushing a baby carriage. The glass reflects your face very briefly.
Part of you is out there, part stumbles about again in some Yoldia
a mute stone and a worn hope in his pocket. still,
that the world’s mute stones would break down into song, give
voice, crumble a couple of notes here, and a key.

Vermeer: the kitchen maid

A great painting does not require a great subject,
kings in pantyhose, the Peace of Westphalia.
The kitchen maid pours milk in a bowl, and soon
the canvas brims with self-radiant liquid
in which the morning and chunks of bread float.
The trap is primed. No rat to be seen.
Bits of something white roll on the floor. Smelling salts?
Under the milky film of the wall there are things
going on that the maid has no inkling of
a cockroach makes its way through the sawdust,
enzymes dismantle compounds into smaller pieces.
Farther away, a star collapses
and begins to radiate darkness.
Its message  – a quantum of black light –
reaches Helsinki only today,
a city surrounded by ramparts of snow.
These, among other things, influence
my being what I am.
I wrap myself in darkness and wait
for the next whim, a tiny,
decisive mistake.

That’s why

The half-drowned
apartment building drifts.
Between the stuccoed ribs
disease blooms, sprouts tendrils.
punctures pulmonar alveoli. articular capsules.
Every night I could melt into the tub
until the water darkens to a hepatic dream.
One must protect oneself against the outside air.
The light draws boundaries that are too clear.
One must protect oneself against the brightness of skin.
That is why I travel deeper into your chest,
crave the tar from your lungs and the tracheae
into which I blow, a fanfare, when we are
heat and hunger,
grow vertically up from the ground toward
the fainted sun,
pull up rails, roots, traffic signs,
rusty legends,
rear up to the height of our withers, slop sweat and oil.

Aerial view

These wondrous mobiles
with which we can conquer distances.
Only the view always is the same heavenly
snow drift, nothing but condensing steam.
Icarus must have cooled his wings here,
the wax whose precise consistency is a mystery to us.
The higher he rose
the worse he froze
until the wax became too cold and melted.
By scientific means machines have been built
in which a human being can rise and fly to another
planetary phenomena in his belly
such as the direction of blood’s circulation. Loneliness
has rarely been a castle in whose cellar
philosophy was tinkered with or music distilled.
The horses were harnessed for death, the rest into museums,
cast in plastic.
The polar sea folds into a pocket
as a map that tells you where you should already
be, and how.

Translated by Anselm Hollo

Poems from Kuningasvesi (‘Aqua Regia’, WSOY, 1999). Introduction by Peter Mickwitz

Aqua Regia

Aqua regia, aqua regia, 
thus dissolve into you 
tallow candles and wing-wax, 
and in the distilled sun's bowl 
gold's will is broken. 
Equal in you are ergot 
and lightning-rod platinum,
 no difference between feather and lead, 
if you perish to become what you love 
you are the dawn's own.

Medieval landscape

He is a man who takes the measure 
of words as if each one of them 
were an angel. Rarely do they 
agree peaceably to dance 
with gravity.

You can see him sowing 
his hymns under the wrong balconies, 
and that is when even one 
stammering syllable feels 
like lightning striking your hip.

Sufficient ransom, if you remember 
the name oft he one you long for. 
His own the man curses 
like a fleur de lys, burnt 
seal on a shoulder.

Diogenes

You citizen of the world and the barrel 
troublemaker in the town square

Whose heart is a mustard seed 
and whose memory-is quicklime

Who fraternizes with stray dogs 
and hates coins more than fleas

Tell us what they taste like 
raw cuttlefish and lupine

What it feels like to search lantern in hand
 for the sun buried in shame 

Tell us how great is the freedom
 envied even by Alexander

How small an empire compared 
to a slave's brash request:

'Sell me to that man.
 He needs a master.'

Translated by Anselm Hollo