I have a long poem here, which is just
published by a little press in Berkeley, California.
Why I am not going to read the whole thing,
I read a great part of it in 1974.
But it was not completed at that time.
And this is the only long poem I have written.
It's called "Baltics."
And that's the plural, doesn't exist.
The name is Baltic.
And that's the sea we have East of Sweden.
At the same time it's the communication
between Scandinavia and the country's East.
At the same time it's a border, and now sometimes very closed.
My ancestors lived in the archipelago
at the Swedish East Coast.
And I have still a house there which
was built by my grandfather who's a pilot.
So, I have very strong roots there.
And the whole poem is partly about this and my ancestors,
about the life in the archipelago 100 years ago,
70 years ago.
It's also about myself.
It's also about political things about,
strategic things in the air.
It's about zoology, flowers, nature.
Many other things.
It's the whole problem is a bag where I put everything
I am committed to, and which has to do with the Baltic.
Although it's difficult to break out parts of it,
but I must do that.
And I read the three last parts of it.
The first one is a rather calm interlude
with a series of small prose poems
starting the whole thing about things I love there.
The last word is Liepaja, and that's
the Latvian town which used to be commercial harbor
before World War II but now entirely a military place
belonging to the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
That's part 4.
And I will comment further, part 5.
"Baltics 4."
From the lee side, close ups. Bladderwrack.
The forest of bladderwrack shine in the clearwater.
They are young, you want to emigrate there, stretch out
on your own reflection and sink down to such and such a depth.
The seaweed holding itself up with air
bladders as we hold ourselves up with ideas.
Bullhead.
The fish that's a toad that wanted to be a butterfly
and made it a third of the way, hiding himself in the seaweed
but pulled up in the net, hooked fast by his pathetic spikes
and warts.
When you untangle him from the mess of the net,
your hands shine with slime.
The rocks.
The small creatures hurry over the sun
warmed lichens rushing like second hands.
The pine cast the shadow, it wanders slowly
like an hour hand.
Inside me, time stands still, endless time.
The time it takes to forget all languages
and invent perpetual motion.
On lee side, you can hear the grass growing, a faint drumming
coming from underneath.
A faint roar of millions of small gas flames.
So it is to hear the grass grow.
And now, the stretch of open water
with outdoors, the open boundaries that
grow broader and broader the further you stretch out.
There are days when the Baltic is a calm limitless roof.
Then dreaming innocently of someone
crawling out on the roof to try to put the hell yards in order.
Trying to hoist the rag, flag that's frayed by the wind
and smoked by the farmers and bleached by the sun that it
could be anybody's.
But it's a long way to reappear.
"5" is the most complicated part of the poem.
It's a diary from my island.
I am talking about the composer among other things here.
His name was Vissarion Shebalin and he died in 1963.
And all the things I tell you here
is documentary like the whole poem.
And there are quotations here two lines
from the Swedish 14th century Chronicle,
which were written in the middle-aged Swedish
and were translated to middle-aged English
by a professor in that language.
I don't know if you understand it when I read it, I'll see.
"5."
July 31.
The channel has become eccentric.
Today, it's teeming with jellyfish
for the first time in years.
They pump themselves along with calm consideration.
They belong to the same shipping company, Aurelia.
They drift like flowers after a burial at sea.
If you take them out of the water, all of their shape
disappears as when an indescribable truth
is lifted up out of the silence and formulated
into a lifeless mass.
Yes, they are untranslatable.
They have to stay in their element.
August 2nd.
Something wants to be said, but the words don't agree.
Something that can't be said.
Aphasia.
There aren't any words that may be a style.
Sometimes you wake up at night and quickly throw some words
down on the nearest paper, on the margin of newspaper.
The words glowing with meaning.
But in the morning, the same words
don't say anything anymore-- scrawls, misspeaking,
or fragments of a great nightly style that dragged past.
You see councilperson, he's a composer,
he's played, has a career, becomes
director of the conservatory.
The trend turns downward, he's blamed by the authorities.
They put up his pupil, K, as chief prosecutor.
He's threatened, demoted, sent away.
After some years, the disgrace diminishes.
He's rehabilitated.
Then comes the stroke, right side paralysis and aphasia.
Can only grasp short phrases, says wrong words.
Can as a result of this not be touched
by advancement or blame, but the music is still there.
He still composes in his own style.
He becomes the magical sensation for the time
he has left to live.
He wrote music to text he no longer understood.
In the same way, we express something with our lives.
In that humming course of misspeech.
The death lecturers went on for several terms.
I was present together with classmates I didn't know.
Who are you?
Afterwards, everyone went off on his own.
Profiles.
I looked at the sky and the Earth and straight ahead.
And since then I have been writing a long letter
to the dead on a typewriter that doesn't have a ribbon, only
a horizon line.
So the words beat in vain and nothing stays.
I stand with my hand on the door handle, take
the pulse of the house.
The walls are so full of life.
The children won't dare sleep alone up in the attic.
What makes me feel safe makes them uneasy.
August 3.
Out there in the damp grass slides in a greeting
from the Middle Ages.
Helix pomatia, the sadly gray gold shining snail
with its jaunty house introduced by some monks
who liked escargot.
Yes, the Franciscans were here.
Broke stone and burnt lime, the island was theirs in 1288.
A donation from King Magnus.
"Thes almes and othres he hath yeven / Thei meteth
hym nu he entreth hevene."
The forest fell.
The ovens burned.
The lime taken by sail to the building of the monastery.
Sister snail stands almost steel in the grass,
feelers sucked in and rolled out.
Disturbances and hesitation.
I like myself in my searching.
The wind that blew through carefully all day,
all the blades of grass are counted on the furthest islets
has laid down in the middle of the island.
The matchsticks flame stand straight up.
The sea painting and the forest painting darkened together.
Also, the foliage of the five story trees is turning black.
Every summer is the last.
These are empty words for the creatures at late summer
midnight where the crickets sew on their machines
as if possessed.
And the Baltics near.
And the lonely water tap stands among the wild rose bushes
like an equestrian statue.
The water tastes of iron.
And the last part doesn't need much commentary.
It's quite simple and documentary.
My grandmother's story, before it's forgotten,
her parents dying young.
The father first.
When the widow realizes the disease will take her too,
she watched from house to house, sails from island
to island with her daughter.
Who can take care of Maria?
A strange house on the other side of the bay takes her in.
They could afford to do it.
But the ones that could afford it weren't the good ones.
Pieties mask cracks.
Maria's childhood ends too soon.
She's an unpaid servant in perpetual coldness.
Year after year, perpetually seasick behind the long hours.
A sullen terror at the table, the expressions.
The pike skin crunching in her mouth.
Be grateful, be grateful.
She never looked back.
But because of this, she could see the new and seize it.
Break out of the bonds.
I remember her.
I used to snuggle against her.
And at the moment she died, the moment she passed over,
she sent out a thought so that I, a five-year-old,
understood what had happened half an hour
before they called.
I remember her.
But in the next brown photo, someone I don't know.
By clothes from the middle of the last century,
a man about 30, the powerful eyebrows,
the face that looks me right in the eye whispering, here I am.
But who I am is something no one remembers anymore.
No one.
TB.
Isolation.
Once he stopped on the stony grass dreaming slope
coming up from the sea.
And felt a black blindfold in front of his eyes.
Here, behind the thick brush, is the island's the oldest house.
The low not trim 200-year-old fisherman's
hut with coarse, gray, heavy beams.
And the modern brass padlock has clicked together on all of it,
shining light, a ring in the nose of an old bull
that refuses to get up.
So much crouching wood.
And other roof, the ancient tiles
that collapsed across them and on top of each other.
The original pattern is raised by the Earth's rotation
through the years.
It reminds me of something.
I was there.
Wait.
It's the old Jewish cemetery in Prague
where the dead live closer together than they did in life.
The stones jammed in, jammed in.
So much encircled love.
The tiles with the lichens letters
in an unknown language of the stones
in the archipelago people's ghetto cemetery.
The stones erected and fallen down.
The ramshackle hut shines with a light of all the people
carried by a certain wave, a certain wind,
out here to their fate.