War of the Beasts and the Animals

The Body Returns

Z

Need to clean the room / need to clear space

Y

So speaks poetry, the poetry that lives in a women’s body in Canada, in English

So she speaks: once cleared the room writes itself

X

And now what to do

The room is shining

The room is cleaned to its bones, its marrow, must write itself, no one writes to anyone

W

Where are they, where are the men like Ares

Who lift the rafters and will not pass through the lychgate

Where is their bone marrow, their pleasuring digits, where are their teeth and tongues

Into what elements have they dissolved

V

Deep underground in the growing cells

Cell unceasingly makes cell

To put forth like apple gall, when the earth harvests its own

Underground rivers grope for their mouths

Sperm seeds

U

Spring pours like warm piss

Over permafrost

And the ice rises and floats.

Under the ice a turmoil of green, yellow letters

And then, when unseeing branches make lone drawings on light

Poetry, speaking Danish, lying under the earth, female

T

Dead, like the others, alive for some reason,

Resting in the hollow cheek of the clay like a boiled sweet

And has no rights, no more than the ones lying under the other bush

Whose only memory is the reflection of self

In the flat pewter face of a flask

Hearing has run dry

There is nothing more for them to hear.

S

Where there was once ear, now there is earth,

Holds the unhearing place in embrace.

Where there was once mouth, now roots mass

To make a wellspring of growth.

Dead poetry speaks, she says

I write like the wind.

She / they / the others / many who come before and after

Lie there, there is no wind, what is there, why do they need wind

R

Break the frozen earth, touch the dead song.

Under the level winter sky says another

From the same Canada, and lying in someone’s earth –

Since September 1922 her germinating body

Must have brought forth fruit: under the level sky

I saw a thousand Christs go by.

What were they doing, we ask from the kerbside.

They were marching.

They were singing.

Q

Winter. 1918. Petrograd.

Poetry heard nothing, except

Noise, constant noise:

A rhythmic boom

And look out of the window

(the fields multiplying, and in them the dead the dead the dead

heads thrown back

tongues stilled)

We see the snowstorm, flutters like lace at the window

And makes a sign: the room is now cleared.

P

And then

When you’ve grown used to the absence of light

And the flickering pixels of matter

And the gunfire on street corners

Where they sold newspapers before

It happened, and every fifth flower was free, gratis

Lubricating the buyer-seller relationship

With the milk of humankindness,

The milk transparent,

Once the eyes have grown accustomed to the scene, the man and his poetry are clairvoyant

There is a Presence here.

O

As if wind (I write like the wind)

Gainsaid any human part in this

As if the room had been flayed to its very bones:

What would remain?

As if the ear of the earth

Its huge funnel, described in Russian in 1837

The year of the death of Pushkin, but notpushkin

Received and transmitted the very same

And even Blok, like Mother Goose,

Says in wreaths of white rose with Christ at their head

And that is how it was.

But who believes a goose.

N

They lie, shot, in ravines filled with stars and bird cherry,

They lie in marshland, like dry stalks, like sprats in cans

They lie under banks, beneath lakes and autobahns

Beneath freerange grazing

Beneath sheep fields, where sheep go wild

Gainsaying any human part to this,

They lie under multistories

And runways

Where fingers of grass slit the paper-thin ice

Where blue signal lamps are cleverly placed

Where powerful bodies fly without our hands.

Where is my body, says the middle stratum

The earth’s middle class: dead and still unresurrected.

M

And poetry speaks and knows what it says: I said

You are gods, I said, and all of you are children of the most High

But you shall die like fools:

Like one of the princes and generals

(politicians and aristocrats

and representatives of the swelling bourgeoisie)

Like mortals

Like nothing could be easier

Than the falling and the falling apart.

You die all the time

Like it was a normal thing to do.

Why don’t you take yourselves in hand?

Why don’t you make an effort,

Says poetry from under the ground, breathing through the hollow reeds.

L

Glory glory let’s gather up this man

(scrape up the body like a lump of strawberry jam)

An eternal flame burns, it consumes the fallen

The unconsidered, undiscovered, the gone-before

Don’t give up your cells to fire, your forty thousand cells

Or your nerve endings, or the fine nets of capillary walls

The ribbed palate, the pelvic down, the dusty pelvic floor

The slight partitions between the mind and ear

How will we gather them for Judgment Day?

Your bones didn’t know they would be saved.

Sacks of seed, everything the body consumed

Iron – in our age becomes part of the exhumed

Body parts parts of another’s body, which has lain here since another age

Together they make a new body

A not-yet-existent person.

K

Poetry, a many-eyed absurd

Nature of manymouths

Found in many bodies at the same time

Having lived in many other bodies before that

And now lying in confinement

Like something about to be born

(But at any moment an expedition of archaeologists

a curious shepherd

a dozen students in shorts

might pull you from the earth,

prematurely, not carried to full term,

and stick their fingers in your toothless gob)

Judging by the phosphorus content in the bone

English-speaking Poetry had a diet of fish.

J

They said, and it was confirmed by a graduate of the Theological

Institute, who quoted a doctoral thesis in support:

We will be resurrected as thirty-three-year-olds

Even those who died aged seventy or aged nine.

The body will know how to be resurrected

This is the body’s privilege:

To eat and drink what it wants

To wander footsore many stadia

To wear upon its skin clothes, wounds, tears

To walk in water and evaporate into the air

To remain unrecognised, to make itself recognised

To resemble a gardener,

A wanderer,

Itself and someone else,

To roast fish on a spit for friends

To rise to heaven and be seated on the right hand of God

As befits the son.

I

Lying on that table

I hear the faint sound of a vacuum cleaner

I feel the breeze on the far edge of my body.

And everything that was in me stands tall like an army

On the very border with air

As if we could still begin a war, and lose it again.

Quick, and then slow

Like a clever dog, first it tilts its head

Then it understands, and it runs to you

So the soul probes its own housing

Curls up inside, the lining of crumbling faded velvet,

Or strokes its leathery lid.

Under the black-and-blue clouds, baroque-sombre

You are reconstituted

Like fish on a fishmonger’s slab,

Your bones, your muscles – picked apart

By a doctor’s prized thumbs

And there you lie, dumb.

H

In an English book

A woman, exhausted by labour pains

And ready to slip out of life, as one might slip through a gate

Is exhorted by another woman to never yield!

An effort, she says, is necessary.

This woman talks in the third person

As if she were discussing the heroine in a novel

Which she could yet be

If only she would rouse herself,

And not run away or release her grip

Show the weakness of her sex.

This is a world of effort, this woman explains.

We must never yield when so much depends on us.

The unheroine makes an uncourageous effort

Trickles

(like underground water through a sieve)

Attaches herself to the dead

Her own body a tessera

Between dead white men

G

Break the frozen earth,

Touch the dead song

Part her chalken lips

Touch with your finger

The bony tubers of tooth.

In one of those dark, underground passageways

An observant little girl finds

What she should never have found:

Large, impossible to avoid

Taking up all the breathing space,

And just to pass along the passage

(running, eyes tight shut)

She now has to push her way through:

A body – someone’s – has consumed all the space,

Frozen solid, dead, no one’s body now.

Wings pressed tightly

Beak and claws drawn in

Damp-downed, eyelids shut

Kiss its transparent feathers:

Swallow, I believe, help thou my unbelief.

And suddenly she heard a tiny flutter in the swallow’s breast:

A faint beat at first, but then louder and louder.

The swallow’s heart had started beating again.

The swallow wasn’t dead, merely stunned from the cold

And now it had been warmed and come back to life.

F

No,

Not the way they sinned

But the way their flesh greened and their curls loosened.

No, not the way it hardens

But the way it’s led by the breeze

Drawing bare branches through aerial blue waters

When I am a weary spidery little insect

Even then it’s a pity to die:

I’d rather wander on a sea of milk.

Young soldiers

In bell-bottomed trousers

Living like tree stumps along the street in spring.

Who are you, resurrected man?

Well, he says, well. You know how things are.

Body of poetry, you are strewn everywhere

Like fired plastic bullets,

That don’t decompose.

Death – the shadow at your back

Resurrection – the brightest shade of black

Up flies the word, you can’t catch it back

E

The least said the soonest.

Word is not a sparrow.

Are not five sparrows

(finches, larks and other such)

Are not five sparrows

Sold for two pennies?

Your price was higher.

You are better than many birds.

And spring is so thin, so miserably wan

Like a nurse, slippers on her bare feet,

Slipping out of theatre, into the hospital yard

For a quick smoke.

He said to me:

Lazarus, come on, let’s get outta here

Where’s the sting,

I’ll get it out,

And if there’s a splinter left in your flesh

We’ll sort it.

And this red stuff, this krasny wet

This Ding, which doesn’t have a name,

Four days now in the corpse pit

Getting stronger and stronger and stood and left.

D

He said to me: Lazarus, come here.

He led me to the banqueting house

And his banner over me was love.

And his left hand was under my head,

And with his right hand he embraced me,

And another hand was placed, as always

On my forehead.

You hold my head with care

As if it were a basket filled with preparations for a feast,

Lined with spread branches of palm,

Filled to the brim with chocolate eggs

Figs, dates, trussed quails,

Fingers of sausage.

You hold my head like a basket

Decorated with ribbons,

And freshly greened twigs

Like a pretty easter basket

And in it lies my head.

Look after it, carry it carefully:

My features trickle through the bone like water.

Put it in a sack.

Put it in a pot.

Grow basil from it.

C

A Roman girl with a pile of flaxen hair

Drawn untidily into a knot

Sitting by the circular fountain

Speaking into her mobile phone.

A man in a leather jacket

On his darkleather body

Making sketches in a notepad

In carmine graphite.

A boy in Saratov. An old woman at the cash desk.

A man selling luminous plastic flying machines.

I want to be each of these people.

I want to live with each of them.

Enter their homes like air

Enter their bodies like an Easterly

Touch their swelling nodules with my tongue

Earlobes

Sea-blue proteins

White fur from elbow to wrist

Sleep’s shadow from navel to groin

Ribs, collarbones, shoulder blades,

Indigo work overalls

Black dress with tiny white spots

All this will be unavoidably resurrected

All this will be unavoidably avoided.

B

A hand buried at Marne.

A hand buried at Narva.

A hand lying in the Galician wastes.

The ash of a hand lying nowhere.

All of this will return.

And when we go to resurrect

A whole forest of stolen digits

Defamiliarised, unrecogniseable, thrown down,

Rustling in the wind above our heads,

Coming towards the rendez-vous

Like Birnam wood to Dunsinane.

And feet, legs, one-legged legs

In rotten boots (and boots boots) –

Leaden soldiers, fallen behind their unit

Units of stone, units of cloud

All these legs standing tall at the doors of inns

And crutches, like the papal ferula

Sprouting green shoots.

And empty, naked prosthetic limbs

Dance behind the cheering crowds like dogs.

And like sacks which once contained provisions

Eaten down to the last crumb

Poetry lies superfluous on the ground.

The train moves off. The blue shutters of summerhouses

At a station. The poplars rise like ladders.

A

De døde kan være så døde

At ingen kan se de er til*

so speaks poetry in Danish

but another speaks in a woman’s voice

another speaks in an English voice

an American woman in an English voice

when the woman who thought it in Danish

is so very dead that she

is almost invisible

but she still exists

…

…

…

they lie like earthed-up potatoes

they lie like forks in a drawer

like thoughts in someone’s head

and no one sees how

how very much

they are completely like us

even more so

alive

alive and so very living

you barely believe they are to be found

(picking through carbon chains)

and in what strange circumstances

we think they aren’t here

* ‘The dead can be so dead / That no one can see they exist’ is from the poem ‘Action’ in Inger Christensen’s It, translated by Susanna Nied.