So Much for That Winter

~ ~ ~

So much for that winter,

I thought, looking at the last crocuses of spring;

they lay down on the ground

and I was in doubt.

Chewed out an entire school because a single sentence bugged me

and drank my hot chocolate, sweet/bitter.

Worked,

considered traveling somewhere I never imagined I’d find myself

yet stayed where I was

and banged on my neighbor’s wall,

was in doubt, but sure,

was insecure,

stood still by the window,

let my gaze move from running shoes to wool socks

and lay down on the bed.

~ ~ ~

Was attacked by a cross between a Rottweiler and a Great Dane in Søndermarken, survived.

Yelled at five dog owners in down jackets, YOU’RE ALL SICK!

Survived.

Ran my route (cemetery, Frederiksberg Gardens, Søndermarken, home) faster than ever.

Propped my hands on my knees and howled at the floor,

Why this now too? Hasn’t it been enough? Hasn’t it?

I howled

and found I’d sustained injury from dog attack on the left side of my tongue,

but surviving, always surviving,

that’s the way I am, not the kind you can knock out,

with tongue before the mirror,

eyes open,

my face a grimace of gums and longing

and ice water for dinner.

~ ~ ~

Pondered what it meant to be happy.

Decided to test what would happen if I were happy,

really happy.

Was afraid to be disappointed.

Cleaned the fridge,

thought about what he’d written

and kept returning to the word self-confidence, wrote that down too,

wrote it down again

and went to the supermarket.

Took in the bottle of wine the neighbor had placed on my mat:

Excuse the noise, Love, Majbritt, it said; so that’s her name, I thought,

and set the bottle atop the fridge,

moved it under the sink,

I’ll drink it for Pentecost,

for Pentecost when I’m happy,

really happy.

~ ~ ~

Woke at the sound of my mirror falling down, and that cannot be good.

Salvaged the glass, but had to go down to the backyard with the frame, and that cannot be good.

Considered crawling under the blankets

or going on a bike ride

or making a change—gills, paws, antennae—

but could not.

Ascertained that when the wind’s in the east, Valby’s Siberia,

roughly just as empty

and full of loose dogs running from hedge to hedge, no doubt after dead birds.

Went for an evening walk on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard.

Heard kids practicing the flute through half-open windows

while blackbirds up on the chimneys sang to themselves

and to the dogs by the hedges

and me on the street beneath Langgade Station.

~ ~ ~

Woke an hour early,

made instant coffee,

drank it,

stood by my kitchen window the same way I stood by my kitchen window when I lived on the island of Fanø and went down to the beach every day and crushed razor shells underfoot: Why do I live here? I’d wondered

and couldn’t have known that one day I would stand in a flat in Valby and look at the crooked tulips in the backyard and wonder the same thing.

Wrote.

Went for a walk in the cemetery, where everything promises spring, and stopped, as I often do, by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave, and Kyhn would always stay the same, rendered in bronze and grown into the birch tree that gnarls above him,

one day I’m going to have to take a picture of that tree,

one day it’ll be something I can show from time past,

I resolved and pilfered a twig,

watched the news,

watched my face go past in the hallway,

watched my feet in woolen socks far below

crushing nothing.

~ ~ ~

Hard wind from the east and everything smelled of southern Sweden.

Tidied up my bulletin board,

went for a run through Søndermarken and through the cemeteries, for now it is spring, and it’s tough to be happy on schedule, and rarely does anyone get what they deserve, yet now it is spring.

Took notes that later might prove useful, and everything’s dicey, but quiet.

Thought of the people you’re allowed to like, the ones you’re not allowed to, and the ones you really do anyway but never mention a word about.

Gave my secrets a good going-over,

and I haven’t given up hope, I still believe that things can open and become soft and alive, German bunkers, Berlin walls, abandoned abattoirs, it’s only a question of time and it’s all well in the end, I thought in line at the grocer’s

and stopped then on the way home outside Blankavej #25, first floor, where someone has a Mao figure standing on the windowsill and when I walk past, I sometimes think he waves and smiles, while other times it looks as if he gives me the finger,

it depends on my belief in things, and if it were always positive, I’d be crazy, I thought,

pleading with myself to raise my head, maybe it wasn’t at all his intention to make it sound that way,

so forget it,

forget the view that day across the canal,

forget the winter-gray roofs,

the way the mitten got snagged on the banister,

the hoarfrost and the sort of things that remain,

shrug it off, forget it,

the injustice of it all,

for now it is spring.

~ ~ ~

That which was yesterday in bud, today is in bloom: the carnations on my table,

the territorial blackbird on the roof, the faint grumbling from my mouth and fridge.

To reconcile yourself, I thought,

and shrugged it off

and put on the Brahms again.

Thought about the art of loving,

about the art of loving in the right way, the art of loving casually, the art of not loving when you love, the art of loving even though you can’t, the art of ceasing to love what you cannot help loving, the art of loving even though it doesn’t pay, and waiting, the art of waiting,

and then I went down to the street and glanced to either side,

no dogs, no cars, just a couple people in the rain

and me.

Bought an ice cream cone,

walked around with it slightly raised before me,

got wet but didn’t care, for people who don’t know how I feel should stop feeling for me, and if they can’t think my thoughts to their conclusion, they should think about something else, maybe they should think about their own lives, and when they think about them, they should ask themselves if their lives make more sense

and do they? I wondered

and walked home to Brahms

and the sounds down in the street.

~ ~ ~

Awoke, walked barefoot across the floor

and ate a bit of bread,

took a scrap of paper from the desk and wrote A red elephant is still an elephant on it

and grew anxious about whether that sort of thing was good enough, felt stupid, felt wan, was myself like an elephant that lurches around and knocks things over, but an elephant among broken glass is still an elephant, just as a person who isn’t up to snuff is still a person, and the Brooklyn movie theater is still a movie theater, and the grieving heart is still a heart, and a red elephant is still an elephant.

Took the bike to Damhus Pond, and it was when I had to brake by the bird-feeding area that I thought of my taxes

and then my accountant,

and then I biked home to my receipts,

crunched the numbers,

and This is a condition, I wrote at the bottom of a heating bill,

this is a way of being,

a change in the structure of existence

like the lull of rainy Sunday mornings,

like trampled sneakers and slightly sour cartons of cream,

and birds on the ground that eat from your hand and shit in place rather than flying,

and birds ought to fly,

a bird that doesn’t fly is no longer a bird.

~ ~ ~

Said thanks but no thanks to a matinée at the opera,

sat instead in the heat as it bit by bit filtered down from the drying attic to the fifth floor,

but Western Cemetery is Denmark’s largest burial ground for the dead, so the living such as I can sunbathe without being seen by anyone but the collared doves on the small plot of land north of the willow allée, and I’m not saying where.

Took off my sandals, and my jersey,

got freckles,

got an urge to bike through South Harbor into the city and hike around the lakes, hadn’t done that since New Year’s Day, which was when he wrote,

I keep imagining how much it must’ve hurt to shoot yourself in the heart with such a big rocket flare.

Stood still on Queen Louise’s Bridge to write down what the old man said as he squeezed his way between a young couple: Just set it down in F major, he said, and went on toward Nørrebro,

and January feels so far away on a day like this, when the clouds form over Sortedam Dossering, and kids with bike helmets wobble along the bike paths while they call to the fathers who have stuck broomsticks in through the back of their bikes so they don’t fall,

but the soul has a long time horizon.

Biked home and made coffee in my Moka Express

and drank it, squeezed out the dishrags, picked candle wax off the table, and I’m bad at being grumpy, but I have stamina, and I’m good at remembering and at loving and forgetting

To be seen as a person amid the January dark

that is no more.

~ ~ ~

Slept as if someone shook me to see if I were awake.

Went to the pharmacy, where the woman with globular breasts took all the headache pill variants down and explained the differences, and her breasts get bigger and bigger every time I go, because she wants to tell me what camphor does to mucous membranes even though I’m buying earplugs, and I have to look at the inhaler even though I’m asking for Band-Aids, and I’m certain that these breasts the size of floating dry docks started out as ping-pong balls before behavior made them grow.

Walked home slowly,

lay on the bed

and let an hour’s sleep turn into three, entangled in the bedspread like a swaddled babe,

woke, put my socks in the drawer,

told myself the story of when I met the crown prince, again and again,

told it so many times that it got pathetic, whereupon several wounds sprung leaks.

Made pasta Bolognese

and went for a walk through a world that to rub salt in my wounds had turned itself the wrong side out and revealed all its inner beauty,

all that fertility in the air, all that weeping in wait, and I’d taken the long way just to see if the elephants in Frederiksberg Gardens had lain down for the night, and the only ones left were the wood pigeons who sat in the grass.

It might have been otherwise, I thought, and looked up at the door that now and then stood ajar to the world, sometimes merely so it could poke its fingers in my face,

and yet

other times I catch a glimpse within as of a whale rising up from the sea with its tiny good clear eye peering at me, infinitely mild and inquiring after its long journey from the bottom, Are you okay?

Not completely, no, for all that I originally asked for was a cup of coffee

and now look at all this.

~ ~ ~

Ran around Damhus Pond, with all the ducklings shunted out of the way in the grass.

Ran so slowly that I was caught by a father and his little boy, and Are there sharks in that water, Dad? the boy asked, and the father replied, Might be,

and if he’d looked back he’d have seen me nod.

Couldn’t sit inside for the sun, couldn’t avoid Frederiksberg Gardens, but there weren’t any elephants, only their smell.

Drew a line in the gravel with my sneakers.

Sat on a bench by the goldfish pond in the graveyard,

opened my bag and sat like that: me and my notes and an ice cream from the cross-eyed man in the kiosk, and yet there lay everything I ought to be observing with the shiny side up.

I don’t know if it’s worth it, I thought,

I think that’ll do now,

and then I nodded to the old gaffer who was talking to himself on the bench opposite, and he might have had Alzheimer’s, or perhaps he was about to make notes too, for he nodded back,

and he was mournful, but alive and kicking,

and We should have the courage to keep at it, he whispered. We should believe, lose, love, be lost and again found,

and he looked at me, whispering,

Necessity is the only criterion,

and he whispered, Forget the pillories,

whispered, Have patience and confidence till the end,

and then I took out my pencil,

and it’s possible I imagined it

but I was sure he giggled.

~ ~ ~

Caught sight of something so small that I couldn’t really see it and longed for it to be larger,

such a little window into such a big greenhouse.

Had to sit on the edge of a kitchen chair and push away the newspaper,

but breathing is a triangle with the point at the bottom and I’m on top, and if I hold my breath long enough my arms will turn into wings.

Ran my fingertip along the edge of an iris, there where it curls inward, and then tugged up the zipper to the darkness (that’s allowed)

and bought white flowers for forty crowns.

Leafed through a book.

Watched one pigeon mount another on the chimney across the backyard, whereupon they went their respective ways along the ridge, balancing, totally matter-of-fact, while those of us over here in our segment know that nothing done is undone,

and that you have to take the consequence.

Agreed with myself never to wear a large hat, not even if I could use some class,

necessity, I thought, alone and stuck my foot out into the crosswalk on Roskildevej.

Walked down the long paths, past Vilhelm Kyhn

and home again

to the flat and my relation to myself. It’s always dicey,

you never know what awaits — an accident, a counterattack, another’s joy, or simply a thought, like when I sat in Chinatown and ate Peking duck and a revelation ran through my head at a point when I couldn’t listen: Pull yourself together, little girl, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life.

Chopped lettuce without cutting my finger

and decided that perhaps in time something good would happen. I do know that something will, I know it, like when you’re riding a train across Zealand in winter:

darkness darkness darkness darkness

and then suddenly a greenhouse crackling warm

in the middle of it all.

~ ~ ~

Woke slowly to the scent of wet sky.

Couldn’t think of a better way to start the day than to run around in the rain in a cemetery,

transcribed straight from a gravestone onto my moist palm the name of Anna Mess (and without reality we’d have lost the knack of fiction long ago).

Wondered why I’m always thinking about Refshale Island, and came to no conclusion,

but when I was young, we’d go to the air show once a year, and there was a place where kids were allowed to sit in the cockpit of a Draken, and the pilot lifted kid after kid up into the plane, first one boy and then another, and then he looked at me standing next to my mom. I suppose you’re going to try to fly too? But I wouldn’t, for what if the sky’s a far better place, I thought, clinging to my mom’s leg,

and seen from that perspective, love is what binds us to the earth.

Got caught in a thunderstorm by Valby PO.

Got caught in a hail shower under the awning of Café Sommerfuglen.

Got caught in a downpour at the library, in a side wind, in the constant dripping from the leaky gutters on Horsekildevej

and kept standing there anyway

until I walked through the graves and the magnolia trees home.

~ ~ ~

It’ll end well, this business. It’ll end well. It almost can’t help but. Denmark’s too tiny and there will always be doors I’ll find myself entering, and then we’ll stand there face to face, me and his rap sheet,

and we’ll be able to have a conversation, I thought,

it doesn’t make sense otherwise, I thought,

and seated myself in the graveyard among daisies and dandelions, and

it’s tough now, yes, right now it’s like driving a car in quicksand and suddenly realizing that the answer lies in the glove box, but you can’t reach the glove box, the glove box is two inches beyond your reach, your fingertips are tingling in the air but the glove box is out of reach and it’s in there, the wig, the magic potion, the pardon.

But it’ll end well, I thought, looking at the daisies.

My birthday was in fifteen days (nearly midlife), but it’ll end well, my life. With patience, industry, and goodwill, it’ll end well.

Biked into town and sat in a café near Kastellet.

Went when the shadows fell, round and round the fort, down to the water, as I usually do, through Nyhavn, as far as I could with arms swinging and the wind in my face, back to the Nyboder quarter, where I put on my bike helmet

(and it’ll all work out fine).

Ate ramen while I gazed down at the pigeons in the backyard, and I’m not stupid, and I’m not blind either, I thought,

so it’ll end well. I know that. It cannot anything but. It ends with my fingers stretching farther and farther and reaching all the way to the glove box without being able to reach it anyhow, but just when my nails are almost able to scratch at the laminated vinyl it opens anyway, the glove box, it opens of its own accord, it opens, for that is what it was made for and wants to do, and the light goes on and there it lies within:

the pardon.

~ ~ ~

Found a picture of the bench in Manhattan where I once sat eating my fruit and writing my postcards: Hey everybody, the world’s exactly like it is back home

(but it wasn’t).

My mouth hurt,

I was dizzy

and found a spot to lie in the sun:

boxwood, lilacs, some obelisks, and among the stiffened pigeons a magpie that looked at me with its impudent head aslant, and I’m sure it had its eye on my sandals.

Listened to the unoiled rollator wheels of the widows passing by.

Saw a heron soaring high above, round and round, and from a distance it resembled both poultry shears and one of those scavengers.

And have I ever been in the US? I asked myself

while I looked at my hands

and walked over to the elephants,

found a bench, dug out a little water and my apple and observed that elephants can be a bit unsteady on their feet too, not to say dizzy, and I am dizzy, as if there’s someone who’s calling me up without using a phone, and I don’t know where my receiver’s located, but when I close my eyes all sorts of things are streaming toward me.

Made a note to myself: there’s the reality that the others keep an eye on, and next to it is my own.

Took a detour home

and maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s bloat or dehydration or some sort of blessing,

but in any case I’m dizzy.

~ ~ ~

Woke up dizzy.

Went sweatily around my flat beneath the drying attic, and water didn’t seem to help.

Tucked the papers in my bag,

seated myself somewhere near the Round Tower and its observatory,

seated myself with my minor infections invisible to the naked eye, suddenly caught in the sunshine, and I thought, So the time has come to learn to surrender.

Walked in the afternoon’s warmest hour down the main pedestrian drag and into a bookstore, to caress one maybe two books on the spine, because that’s why they stand there, they’re just like the rest of us, they want to be caressed and loved despite it all,

I thought, and saw there was a figure from TV, balancing with an ice cream cone outside the window on a miniature bike.

Embarked for home, scalding hot, like a little steel espresso pot,

lay down, thought, There’s nothing wrong with me, but if I lie still then the echo chamber might stop tormenting me,

but it didn’t.

Dozed, took a stroll as slowly as I could, elastic as a dromedary, languid and lazy amid nature’s example for emulation: Come on, just overdo it,

and everything so lovely that it trembles, and I stand, undeterrably dizzy in the midst of it all

and listen, now the blackbird’s singing

and soon the chestnut will blossom.

~ ~ ~

Opened my hand and grabbed hold: I’m not letting go.

Set the fan four inches from the table.

Went for a walk in Western Cemetery,

sat in the shade of a dawn redwood and gazed at the monument of some random industry baron, pyramidal and ivied and all, and I thought,

He’s just like an Indian, that’s what he is, an Indian who enters his teepee after the lost battle to find the Indian in himself. He sharpens his spear, confronts his demons, sings about the night, sticks cords through his chest muscles and hoists himself through pain toward the light. He does it to find the Indian in himself again, and when he’s discovered him, he steps out of the teepee. And his woman is a squaw who’s seen the Indian in him the whole time and, no matter what he does, is able to see the Indian in him, but she also knows that the man she loves is precisely the sort of Indian who, after the lost battle, enters his teepee to find the Indian in himself again, so she doesn’t go anywhere. Where should she go?

Sat out in the sun,

lay down to read but looked chiefly at the sky, full of hoverflies and planes, and I’m not going anywhere. Where should I go?

Scribbled down an inscription: IN GRATITUDE.

Scribbled down an inscription: ALWAYS MISSED

and thought, No doubt it’s just a transition phase,

and then I walked home,

clipped my nails,

and drank my coffee scalding from the pot while I looked at my hand holding the nail clippers, the pen, and the memory of things I have seen and held true,

and it held on, my hand, it’s not letting go.

How could it?

~ ~ ~

Woke and could tell that it’d be a good day.

Biked to Dragør, which was the spit and image of the village I lived in on the island of Fanø.

Walked the bike straight out to the Sound and looked out toward Sweden, where clouds were gathering, but it didn’t matter, because above me the sky is always blue.

Read, in the scent of saltwater, wet dogs, and children, until the mist reached the Øresund Bridge,

bought a shawl in a dime store

and ate an ice cream cone on the lawn in front of one of the cannons that in 1808 had sent seventy balls into the hull of the Africa, pride of the British fleet, and ’twas on a day like this, with jam in the corners of the mouth and the will to believe that the tide of battle had turned.

Walked along the water,

sat down by the harbor,

gazed at the swans while a father and his little boy raced along the breakwater, on a day with no trapdoors but with swans and the breeze on my face, and there is peace, there is only kindness and good intentions and abundance in the hollyhocks, the half-timbering and the swans, the swans and then all the saltwater below.

Biked homeward and was already freezing in my summer frock by the white church in Dragør.

Biked through the airport tunnel just as a Boeing or something took off, and the pressure and its flight out into the world shook the ground, the bike, and me as I sang, because no one would be able to hear me anyway in all the happiness

of just such a blind and sated Pentecost Copenhagen.

~ ~ ~

It was the sky from the morning,

the sky and my hand resting on the duvet,

and it was the rain and the writing on the wall, on the shopping list, in the letters

and the walk in the cemetery under white hawthorn, red hawthorn, and me and a squirrel in the willow allée.

Reserved a table at the hotel for me and Dad and Mom, and I’m looking forward to them seeing where I live, and I’ll show Dad the planetarium and Christiansborg Palace, and I’ll show Mom that that house by the Søndermarken streetcar stop where she once lodged for a week as a twenty-year-old, not knowing that one day her children would exist and that her daughter would stand brimming and point, that that house is still standing.

Thought about my dentist while I boiled eggs,

wrote a crucial note,

had an attack of vulnerability from the silence that fights back

and then took a walk on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard among the girls hopscotching and the boys with their scooters and then me and my insecurity, but the one who writes must dare to stand with her fledglings stuck to her fingers and surrender them in showers of spittle and roses

and keep going, because it’s important

and keep going, because it’s alive

and keep going, because that’s what she believes

and that’s the way the future is,

keep going, because she loves it (I love it)

and keep going when she can’t do anything else (I dare to)

and keep going, because that’s the whole idea.

That’s the whole idea.

~ ~ ~

Got Mom and Dad from platform 2, Copenhagen Central Station, and they waved the whole way through the passenger tribe.

Let Dad tell everyone on the metro where he was coming from.

Let Mom hold my hand all the way home from Langgade Station.

Expected nothing less and said nothing about my expectations.

Took Valby from the green side, took Frederiksberg with flowers, wood pigeons, ducks, and Dad in the zoo,

and it was the same animals they had in Central Park, I remember, penguins, polar bears, and wolves, and the stench of the primates’ urine also the same, and I sat tailor-fashion like a local bohemian on a knoll with my takeaway and phoned Dad, who was walking about among his trees on the other side of the planet. I can see the Empire State Building from where I’m sitting, I lied. And I can see the transformer tower, he lied, and then we spoke for the rest about how long it had taken my postcard to get there.

Had my picture taken with Dad and the cow with black patches.

Let Mom hold my hand, and I didn’t say a thing, and didn’t cry either.

Walked home through Søndermarken,

made them coffee while they rested their legs,

made notes about that when neither of them was watching, and then

let Dad tell everyone in the restaurant that it was my birthday.

Went home by Magnoliavej after dinner and the birthday business,

the lilacs, the California poppies, and Mom’s fingers in my palm, quietly morsing the message, It’ll all turn out okay, it’ll all turn out okay,

it’ll be okay,

my mother’s fingers morsed, and then I morsed back

Yes it will, yes it will.

~ ~ ~

I was the Gefion Fountain, that was me it came from, and it flowed out across Central Station, the metro to Valby, and up the stairs to my flat, and the plash that sounded a bit after noon was me letting go in the hallway.

Tried not to drip on the table, even though I was filled with the sort of fluid you find in tear ducts, primordial soups, and amniotic sacs.

Went over the empty flat with a dishtowel.

Donned my running clothes, but was too beat to run and walked slowly with the sight of laburnum like a weight in my chest, and I miss everything, if anyone can understand that.

Fed a house sparrow from my hand and drowned it.

Got a call from Mom: We’re home now, and that was that, and it wasn’t that, it was more the entirety of it all, and everything that was lacking in order for life to proceed,

and then I walked home with my shoelaces untied and muddy.

Was in the shower without turning on the water,

sat slightly sweaty in the dusk,

and it wasn’t dangerous, I reflected about my day as a baroque wetland. It’s just an aspect of the ability to love

and thereby of love itself

and thus a sort of blessing.

~ ~ ~

Woke up one year older, feeling that this should be seen as a sign,

but it isn’t a sign of anything, other than that a day has passed.

Paid my back taxes,

attended to my mail,

and took a long walk along the usual route through the cemetery to the elephants, and their mighty bodies played with each other in the pool as if they knew full well that their weight could prove fatal, and I stood there a long time, I stood at the side of an old woman who also pondered the elephants’ love lives.

Bought scones at the good bakery on Gammel Kongevej

and sat down on the way home to read a book, not far from the grotto in Søndermarken, but was badgered by a duck that begged bread from park visitors, while the sweethearts on the blanket next to me were watching all the birds warily, including mine, because the woman was afraid of birds and because the man enjoyed defending her from them,

and so we managed to pass the afternoon that way.

Felt pain in my mouth,

pain in my lower back and the one hip,

walked slowly home

and opened all the windows, for it’s a mild evening in Copenhagen,

and tomorrow I will maintain my faith in the day after tomorrow,

and that one day it will be me who’s allowed to be there when the instruments are tuning,

for there comes a day,

and a day after that day,

that’s the way days are.

~ ~ ~

Slept late,

went for a run,

lay down in bed and was awakened by the pigeons,

went for a bike ride after dinner to Western Cemetery and sat down someplace among the dead where no one could find me, and wished the evening the best, for that couldn’t hurt.

Went home, because the mosquitoes began to bite, and made a cup of coffee,

stood there with the coffee in my hand,

stood there and my nose grew cold, it suddenly hit me,

Perhaps I spend too much time in cemeteries, I thought,

and lay down on the floor, vanished corporeally, and if I don’t exist, everything up to this point doesn’t exist either, my history, America, the stone I walk around with in my pocket, and then what he wrote last winter,

and if none of those things exist, sorrow doesn’t exist, and then tomorrow doesn’t exist either,

I thought, unable to breathe, for that which doesn’t exist cannot breathe,

for there aren’t many advantages to being that which doesn’t exist, except for being able to walk through walls and listen at doors,

and I’d heard it all now, so what is that?

Got to my feet,

placed myself over by the window,

listened to one of the neighborhood dogs and stayed with it through thick and thin,

thought, Why doesn’t anyone let it in? and could feel I was no longer a young woman,

just a woman who has lived longer than my neighbor and the dog down there and many of the dead, and a thousand years ago I would have long since been laid in my grave, I thought, but look at me now,

mournful, alive, and kicking,

and I’d like to be able to believe in tomorrow,

and I can’t do anything but;

I’m hopelessly up the creek in the situation.

~ ~ ~

Sent my regrets,

thought about life’s insistence on equilibrium: we lurch from side to side, and for every time someone’s caressed on the cheek, there’s a place in the world where someone gets boxed on the ear, for every gleam of sunlight a shower of hail, for every door opened one closed, and thus for the heat that arises one place, somewhere else a new magnet is placed on the fridge.

Scribbled down the line: From her heart sprang the periphery of everything.

Scribbled down the line: Grow up!

and tied a ribbon in my hair.

Went for a walk in the cemetery,

placed the petals from the first rugosa in my palm,

and everything’s dicey, but quiet.

Thought that the worst thing about the things that change us for life, is that every day we have to persuade ourselves not to look at them and how they attest to the insignificance with which we’re shuffled around, we’re lost and found and lost again,

these daily administrative actions,

even my pulse isn’t sacred,

my family, my writing, my best intentions,

everything’s dealt with, I thought,

and tomorrow it’s up and stand on your feet, stand and walk and bear the dead weight from place to place,

jump over the sun,

make contact with the universe

and continue on down to the laundromat.

~ ~ ~

Today I was visited by Kali.

Dropped things on the floor, wanted to split in half but couldn’t,

and I can’t bear that this is a world where those who wreak damage are praised, and then today I’m visited by Kali.

Felt the fury drawing up from the floor through my body like a soundless roar,

volcanic, huge, fragile.

Biked in to a friend’s,

and then we were sitting there when a door slammed, and I, who’d tried all morning to get myself to cry, split before the eyes of another person, but it was no relief for she didn’t know how to respond, and it’s no good splitting and not being discovered, so I screamed the whole way home on the bike with the silence that civilization demands.

Made it home soaked to the skin, five miles in squall and downpour,

went through my keepsakes,

the written proofs,

and what should I believe among all the half-truths?

Wrote on the back of an envelope lying on the counter, I’m angry, and not everything is art, whereupon I picked all the magnets off the fridge and watered the clover on the windowsill,

shoved the dishes around as I washed them, because I hated doing them, just as I hated the deli counters in upscale supermarkets and the dog owners in Søndermarken, and I wanted to move back to Jutland and live in a henhouse and use empty beer cans for target practice, just to be close to something that seemed real, and dare to assume dance position and lead myself around the floor, utterly alive, three-dimensionally present with pulse and all,

for I will exist, So find me then, before I can’t feel myself anymore, I whispered out through my teeth, and then she found me, Kali, the angriest woman in the world,

and it isn’t that I don’t believe in the good in others.

It’s that the others don’t believe in the good in me.

~ ~ ~

Thought, It’s a long way from the dream of America to this, and remained prone.

Thought about scabs and chamomile tea.

Couldn’t make myself clear on the phone.

Couldn’t stand other people, so I went out among them, and I walked past thousands but saw not one.

Reasoned, Perhaps the part of me that once was in the us can still be found between the lines,

but that isn’t enough in the long run.

Went past the elephants, who were apparently doing well and, unaffected by anything, bathed in the pool and went on with their lives, trunk-flinging and backslapping, and on the way home I fainted in the cemetery behind a box hedge.

Cold sweat and hands asleep, daisies.

Remained prone afterward and relished the feeling of lost consciousness,

remained prone when the drizzle started,

remained prone until I could tell I was cold,

and then I got up and went out and looked for the next cemetery.

Reasoned, International Women’s Day would have torn me to shreds on the spot. But then it got me at last, and how many times do you have to hit out at a woman before she learns to duck?

Bought a hot dog on Toftegård Square

and didn’t want to go home, just to keep walking with the conviction that, if you keep walking, you’ll come to a day where you’re happy once more.

Reasoned, Perhaps the part of me that once was in the US has been placed in a pantry in my mind, from where she can be retrieved again

(but that isn’t enough in the long run).

Walked home

and scribbled this down: I am plagued by the vision of a faraway spring and my ability to read between the lines. I am a witness to my own truth in a flood of false evidence.

~ ~ ~

Slept as though I were two people, and one of me awake.

Called Mom, without whom my nozzles would be shot.

Thanked Kali, whose rage had driven me a small piece of the way out of the fog, this anxiety that reality will fail you, like late-night phone calls, cops at the door, others’ perpetual worrying, and then you sit there and have to insist that you’re doing it right and will manage, but after months of this you’re weighed down with belief fatigue.

Signed for a book and bore it from the post office through the supermarket and home.

Sang the same line again and again

and realized that, just because people aren’t walking around with drips and catheters or lying in recovery position in bedrooms full of empties, it doesn’t mean they’re intact.

Went for a run, strong in the legs, as if Kali had given me some of her primordial soup,

and it’s spring now,

and it is woman’s weakness to believe it’s because she isn’t good enough that things don’t go according to plan (and it is woman’s weakness that things should go according to plan).

Envied all of them who looked as if they were in the catbird seat, on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard for instance,

people I hadn’t heard from in years,

all of them who thought they knew better because they were doing better.

Wrote a thank-you note to Aunt Margrethe on the island of Fanø for the lovely amber necklace she’d sent

and sat there with Kali like a force in my body, for she’s screamed me a piece of the way,

I’m on course to getting smarter,

I’m not nearly as empty-handed as yesterday,

and I am standing.

~ ~ ~

Went over the coded signs and symbols.

Brushed my teeth and ate my breakfast.

Sat down with a book on a bench in the cemetery and listened to the singing gibbons from the zoo and the raucous sirens in the distance, and wounds are wounds, but not in the long run.

Picked up a dried-out dog turd,

cast it away while I yelled, To stifle things!

and spooked the retired ladies in Park Cemetery, whose dogs leave turds behind in the general offcasting of everything in life that we don’t want to bear around with us anymore

(but the soul has a long time horizon).

Scribbled down in the book’s margin, Diceyness is the worst, and then walked home to go on reading,

read all that which was written there, as one reads a paper on the lookout for one’s own obituary,

read as if the next subordinate clause might be my last, but I didn’t die,

and then discovered myself, like a quiet tremor in the hand during winter, and I cast away anxiety, for that which trembles in the hand one place is certainty in another, and diceyness is the worst.

Thought, If behavior made the globular woman at the pharmacy’s breasts grow, then what might not be growing in me right now? My mind, my grief, my heart?

Ate too many apples,

drank too much coffee,

so I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were going to solve a rebus,

or I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were two people and the other one awake,

I’ll have to go to sleep with legs entangled in something,

between the falling manna and the desert sand

I am discovered, I am,

and therefore can sleep.

~ ~ ~

It’s not the coffee that keeps me awake, it’s Kali.

Tried to work, but Kali goes around grousing in the corners, jealous and insecure, pouting lips and all.

Did laundry.

Bought new running shoes.

Received a book for translation and leafed through the next month’s work (while Kali grumbled), thought of Grundtvig (and Kali grumbled), wanted peace and quiet, wanted things brought back to earth (but Kali grumbled),

and it isn’t that I don’t like being the goddess of death, but I can’t stand still, I have to tromp on the floor in the laundromat, on the sidewalk, the grass, the ground, I thought

and went for a walk in the cemetery while the clothes were in the tumbler, and Kali cast dog turds, and as for me I scribbled down this inscription from Landlord Frandsen’s obelisk:

Eternity lasts a long time,

and I thought, Everything is so lovely, even the cinquefoil’s blooming,

and then we stood there and looked at it, me and Kali, we looked at the cinquefoil, which didn’t know any better (don’t smite it, Kali),

but then she smote it, she smote it on the yellow petals

because it ought to have known better,

it might have known that,

that this was how it would turn out,

that it would turn out how it did,

it might have known

everything!

~ ~ ~

Was awakened by the heat.

Went to the flea market on Tullinsgade.

Watched a bagpipe band march through Værnedamsvej and continue out to the Vesterbro quarter, and God knows where they are now.

Was at the home of someone I know and not a peep from Kali, Kali just sat there while we looked at pictures and spoke of the sort of things that women can speak of, sunscreen and our time in the Women’s Army Auxiliary, and in the absence of things to abuse, Kali took the back stairs and skedaddled, so I biked home alone.

Went for a run in the new running shoes,

ran, but fell at precisely the same spot where I’d always thought, I’m going to fall there someday.

Washed my knee off at the playground faucet, where kids were standing in line with their butts bare, and I stood in the back of the line like one of them, thinking scrapes were a chance to be comforted and expecting to pick off the scabs slowly soon afterward, and it would be a summer without short dresses.

Stopped by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave and looked at the birch tree that was planted over his coffin in 1903, bearing witness that Vilhelm Kyhn is extremely alive today.

Felt tired,

let things lie beside each other—

the frying pan, the dishrag, the joy, together with the insecurity and the French press; the shoes; the being inside, but outside, unseen, but discovered; the being hurt and the recovering, present, smarter, potentially happy, and entangled in will; and the dish towel — everything coordinated with a little prayer:

Have patience and confidence until the end.

~ ~ ~

Ate an apple in the middle of the night as the light seeped in over from Sweden.

Biked into Kastellet,

drank tea on a bench in the shade of a tree by one of the bastions,

plucked grasses and Queen Anne’s lace,

made the dust rise on the paths

and looked at that bronze angel who wants to walk across the water to southern Sweden, and it was chillier this winter, I thought, much chillier, and knowing that is something no one can take from me, but I can’t share it, I bear it with me like a song stuck fast in the throat, like when I was supposed to sing “The Blessed New Day” for confirmation,

and all that love has not been able to find peace since.

Watched a wooden ship squeeze into Copenhagen’s harbor (as if it were long ago).

Watched a man eat his meal by himself at a restaurant on Borgergade (as if it were long ago).

Biked through the city, just one person on wheels among thousands of others on the way home to their own, exhausted and holding every conceivable unshareable thing inside,

rubbed the skins off new potatoes

and set the grasses in a vase on the counter,

thought of blackbirds and other singing creatures,

of all there’s been, and tomorrow,

of my obligations, my dreams, my dusty sandals,

and then that which despite everything still calls,

Come.

~ ~ ~

Said, Now you’re going to take one day at a time.

Said, And this is the first of those days you’re going to take one at a time

and stood up then and had run out of milk.

Walked past the cemetery pigeons, and it isn’t that life goes on but that it’ll never stop,

was in the Frederiksberg Gardens,

hesitated by the pacifier tree and recalled Mom standing in a campground kitchen with a Swedish woman and a Dutch woman, the three of them busy looking into the bottom of a saucepan and taking ticks off some kid, and I never offered up even a single pacifier to the pacifier tree on the path to the Chinese Pavilion.

Bought a strawberry ice cream cone and couldn’t grow up, no matter how much I might want to.

Took the words from my mouth and laid them in a small white coffin.

Read in the shade of a cemetery tree,

read page after page in the scent of warm box and felt pain in my tooth,

but that didn’t matter.

Stopped by Kyhn’s grave on the way back, and it was the roses,

centifolia, multiflora, and Astrid Lindgren, and there I stood and set aside everything I hoped for, and it was as if he turned his head from his verdigris bronze plaque and gazed down at me:

Why, there we have you then, woman,

hover flies about your face

and utterly alone.

~ ~ ~

Stayed in bed taking another’s downfall to heart,

and stones deliberately thrown in the other Zealand blazed through me as if on a sonar, and now I don’t know what I fear most: the sound of bones being crushed against the floor or things that rise up in the air, that which we never forget or that which we brush off, pistols against temples or threats pointed inward, the inertia of sorrow or its release.

Promised to go to Tivoli (but declined the carousel in advance).

Went for a walk in the afternoon heat.

Had to stop frequently to rest a bit, for as soon as I feel alone inside, someone else steps on the stage.

Sat down by the goldfish pond,

thought of Indians, of clear skies and endless plantations. Thought of America, the heat, and another, of how I’d do violence to myself if I didn’t revisit those places that I had, without much success, already afflicted with my plaints.

Longed for the smell of winter’s cottages when they’re opened up in June.

Longed for northwest Jutland and read poems in the shade,

wanted to forget everything I hadn’t had, and which I should prepare to lose,

and chose the music on the lawn,

the soft ice cream and the helium-filled balloons,

the doubt, the sham happiness,

for I don’t know what I fear most, the sound of bones being crushed against the floor, or the sight of a child’s hand letting go of the string on Bugs Bunny

as easy as nothing.

~ ~ ~

Woke and rattled my arms.

Biked to the Open Air Museum in Brede.

Walked first thing into a house from Fanø, and something’s missing in this Zealandic heath — the local dances, the wading birds, or perhaps just Aunt Margrethe and a coffee machine.

Went from house to house.

Inhaled the smell of a lost hay cutting and the sight of that feathered wing hanging above it all, and I know I’m doing the right thing, and I know that it hurts (but just like birth, such things can be endured), I know that, just like I know that houses no one lives in no longer exist, and I want to exist.

Used a toilet in the section on early industrialization.

Moved so slowly that I nearly stood still

and thought of the future, for you have to believe in it, thought of the past, because I could see it, thought of my memory and sat with it under an elderberry tree:

and taciturnity’s a form of protection, I decided,

pinching off the heads of the wild chives that dangled about in the grass.

Watched a child crying after a run-in with a nettle bush by the double farmstead from southern Sweden,

felt pain in my tooth,

but as we’ve seen, everything’s just a transition phase, I thought

and took Kongevejen home.

~ ~ ~

Woke knowing I would enjoy the surgical intervention, the painkillers, the cotton wads, the simplicity of scalpels, the body’s transitory nature as the soul’s lacerations persist and flap forever in the wind.

Had my last wisdom tooth extracted,

had my mouth stitched up with needle and thread by a man who said I would heal slowly because my age was against me,

as if I didn’t know that, I thought, as if it isn’t such things that make me stop midmotion in plotting out the future, and if you’ve got something for aching of the heart, Dr. Lars, if you’ve got something for emptiness and loss of voice, if you’ve got something for time’s tooth, then be sure to add it to my bill, but otherwise I think you should hold your tongue, unless you want to hear my philosophy of teeth — would you like to hear it? Would you?

Didn’t get the tooth to bring home.

Had to dismount several times from my bike to spit blood, and I don’t give a hoot, for in the midst of melancholy I am Kali, and Kali spits blood where she lists.

Bought large quantities of ice cream.

Was knocked out by the painkillers.

Didn’t waken till evening, when I sat up with a start: Is this still the summer that would never end? and then I felt my tooth, just because it’d disappeared.

Went for an evening stroll in the cemetery.

Decided to cast away the things that have plagued me for a long time, like my fridge, the failed effort, and, now that I was on a roll, the bleeding gums and inviolability,

but I can’t cast away the human being, I thought, gazing at Snebjørn Gudmundson’s gravestone with its doves and its birthdate in Reykjavik.

Cannot cast away recollection,

cannot cast away Brahms and those parts,

cannot cast away the memory and feeling and loss of my voice,

cannot cast away life, cannot cast it away.

~ ~ ~

Ran my tongue over the wound, and it was still there.

Sorted laundry, two piles, Tuesday.

Managed to exchange the wrecked sunglasses but could not exchange them for winter, no matter how much I wished to.

Concluded that what from my vantage appears to be the cold could well be something else,

but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering

(and I shouldn’t think that it won’t continue either, for it does continue, day in and day out it continues, this hesitation that has taken me hostage, and it’s going to be the longest summer ever, it’ll be a summer that never lets go, and I’ll end up being unable to distinguish it from last summer, which was precisely the same and kept on being so until the roses closed up from frost in the end of November, when I got the flu and a measure of peace).

Washed the floor and rinsed with chlorhexidine

and stood stock-still at the tail end of the afternoon and issued a sound that made all the dogs in Valby howl,

made the wound spring a leak, made me want to sing along, though I could not.

Went to yoga and assumed boat pose,

and something must continue, though it cannot keep going, I thought. There must be an end to it. What we know and what we see before our eyes must merge and become one image. I want what I hold to be true and the magnets on the fridge to resemble each other, I thought as I lay and pitched in the surf.

Biked home, called Mom to tell her,

I want to have what’s promised and what’s living to make sense,

and then she fell silent on the other end of the line,

as if she were stroking me indulgently on the cheek.

~ ~ ~

Woke to the throbbing in my mouth.

Sat up, thinking, I can no longer remember a thing.

Managed Stormgade on my bike,

found a place at the Royal Library and worked with the water behind me

and then discovered that the young man to my right in the reading room (as if in a piece of fiction) was busy reading a book about dental X-rays,

and if it weren’t because one’s supposed to be quiet, I’d lean over and show him what I’ve lost, and I’d tell him how much it hurts, and then he could say something about the enamel and the cotton wads, whereupon we’d both have gone to lunch at Café Øieblikket that much the wiser.

Drank my coffee in small sips with the view of Lange Bridge and recalled last winter,

recalled the gray light over Christianshavn, the way the mitten had gotten snagged on the banister, and I walked with my stollen back to my place, which vanished before me:

I don’t want to, I cannot, and you mustn’t write me anymore, he’d written,

nothing else,

and the time since had passed with knowing the difference between wanting and being able to.

Biked home with my dictionary and manuscript

to the small scraps of paper on my desk.

Went for a run in Frederiksberg Gardens and for a moment assumed that the ladder-to-heaven flowers were snowberries,

grew uneasy,

grew insecure,

but then I remember the light in the kitchen, how the doors opened and the faces lifted, the dive of the bats, and that moment on the bench when the words in my mouth sat fast like that wisdom tooth, which until Monday sat fast in me and now is gone, and that was after America and before the birds settled in the grass, and I should have said that, I should have spit it out on the flagstones, like I’ve been spitting blood at present, but that’s the sort of thing you always know afterward, and I’m a woman, not an oral surgeon.

Tied my laces by the elephants.

Tied them again by the crematorium

and looked up and walked home

and could not forget a single thing.

~ ~ ~

Cut to the bone had it not been for the duvet.

Tried to work but was the whole time up on tenterhooks, down on my knees, back and forth on the floor.

Scribbled down my memoirs: I couldn’t help it.

Scribbled them down again: I was fragile, I was bone china,

and I was Kali with a touch of Pippi and Pippi with a touch of the little match girl,

and it isn’t that I’ve got to contain them all in me, master and miniature alike, it’s more that I shouldn’t lose face during.

Told Mom that it was unbearable, now that I’ve sat and waited so long in this waiting room: So it’s finally your turn, Miss Delicate, think you can still stand on those legs? and when I called her up, it was because she was always the one who took me to the doctor when I was little, the one who asked, Could you listen to the child’s heart? Just to be on the safe side

(and so I felt the cold metal against my skin, and the doctor moved the stethoscope across my chest in small hops as if my heart were in flight, for there isn’t anything the heart fears more than people who listen to it of their own free will).

There’s a goodness besides the one you’re waiting for, said my mother. So be patient, she said,

and then I opened the windows to hear the Vietnamese neighbors’ party in the backyard, for happiness may well occur in ways we don’t understand, I thought, looking at the love I have and safeguarding it against enemy forces the way an Inuit guards his whale-oil lamp,

his mukluks,

and his laughter.

~ ~ ~

Grabbed the egg the second before it hit the floor,

went to the grocery store and dragged my little basket along

and took my place at the end of the line.

Fell into a reverie at the sight of the corpulent woman who is the supermarket’s star cashier because the only thing she can do is move her arms, and they guide other people’s everyday lives past the bar code reader so fast, you can hardly see the gold ring that shines on her finger, but it’s there, and inside it says Your eternal beloved.

Bought new bulbs, since everything burns out anyway.

Decided that despite it all, I would stick to the truth as I knew it

and walked over to the cemetery,

and the pigeons rose into the air.

Discovered a gravestone of a person whom I knew to be utterly alive, and I’d walked down that path countless times but never seen the stone before, or in any case never noticed the name, so perhaps it wasn’t there yesterday, or there’s another person buried there, or I just see my truths gradually as they unfold before me,

I thought, and noticed that the person in question had died in 1934, and that it could therefore in no way be the same one, but other than that there was an absolute convergence of things that didn’t make sense

and I felt humbled,

I felt listened to

and loved beneath the surface,

and bore in mind the thought that for God, a gravestone is just a scrap to make notes upon, the way the rest of us write our small concerns on the papers on the desk,

and one thing is inescapable: I write,

I write

centifolia, multiflora, and Astrid Lindgren.

That cannot be changed, I thought

and skirted the high-piled Midsummer Night bonfires, smiling (demented)

across the hay-scented lawns home.