All One Horse

the corrupted poem: fsk

We step out of the hotel; the sky is clear, a clean blue crack, pinch of autumn you might say; slight shiver of what’s to come like the rapid wriggle of a fish in cold liquid; gloom lurking beyond the horizon, the half-heard mournful hoot of the ferry-boat glimpsing its own reflection through the morning fog over the water, the madness in the mind, the poem behind the words you might say. But for now the air is bracing — a whiff of sal volatile. The city has a patina in tones of yellow, the tree leaves crusted by a sun which has lost its warmth but accumulated its glow: a gold-leafed city you might say. (You may say whatever comes to mind and it won’t change much. I is I. Then I am also the writer, the saltimbanco paraded in foreign parts, the sambo, the African, the saltigrade tumbler, the side-show. That makes two of us and we are so invigorated by the shimmering surroundings that we sometimes break into a saltarello. And then I’m writing this as we skip along from sound to sense to full stop, according my pen the saltatory movements of the fish. And that makes three of us.)

So we step out — Kråka, Nep, Tüne, Björn — hands in pockets, bloom on cheeks, deodorant under armpits, wind in hair, tinkle of salty laughter on lips, ripple of silver slivers and shards on water. Sightseeing. Get to the point, you might say. Yes, we are on our way there. Over the bridge, along the banks of a rush of water. Many bridges, much water, locks, weirs, levels, dappled light, skimming images, a tidal swelling and sough, lake and inland sea. Fishermen are wetting their lines. Kråka laughs. Björn tells of how once a year the authorities empty buckets of little fish in the waterways, like silver digits, like spittle-smoothed syllables. Thus do they stir up the surface to entice the populace. These fingers must be writing away somewhere and by and by the syllables must be putting on sense, but they regularly vanish for ever, as if to sea. Does the fist remember the fingers? What remains is blank intensity.

For Nep it is timely for us to be reminded that we are in a romantic city. Have we quite forgotten how many poets hide here? Do we not on the blurred screen of our mind’s eye see the slumped silhouettes, their slurring gait? Ah, and ever since forever, since time and time and half a time at least, the bleeders have slunk here on dark nights, shattered by love and other demons of misery, to lean over the parapets and pour their poor poems into the sombre flood. These verses were to clods of secret soul-eruptions still warm and wet, at times consisting solely of an oath or an aah. They would watch the undigested truths hit the black mirror like so many sobs, to sink into eternal oblivion, leaving neither phosphorous wake nor echoing ripple nor flip of fin. In effect, joining the other disappearances.

Maybe this explains that. Was Nep Tüne demonstrating to us how a fish partakes of water the way a poem turns words into flesh? Ingurgitating the flesh in other words?

Kråka laughs. What about? Wait! Come closer and lend us your eyes. Please allow us to clear up past errors. Look, one old gentleman is pulling a flash from the water. Would you believe it? There is this thing finally flopping at the end of his line.

And now cheers go up. Hats trace surprised eyebrows in the air. There comes the fracas of a band up Strömgat, horsemen with wide buttocks preceded by a banner ruffling the wind, men in plumed hats crashing cymbals, a hoarse shouter of hup-hup-hup.

The fisherman scoops up his catch. Waits for it to die from alienation. Up on his hind legs and off to the nearest news stand, where he grabs a scandal sheet to wrap around his find, some bladet or posten or nyheter, other-world news intimately against inked meaning, to carry same home as if on a salver.

And quick now. After all, our time is up. Please excuse the saltus. The man warms the pan. After some time he opens the paper. And weeps over the tarnished phonemes — like dull scales — of the corrupted poem: Fsk.