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(after the Finnish of Gosta Agren)
If you should go to Samarkand
you might find Scheherazade
reproduced a thousand times,
tinsel-clad, in gift shops,
and Al-al-Din’s gold-plated domes
slung with Soviet tourist signs
and tarnished, on a brassy sky.
But staying is a kind of leaving.
From here, the fields of Oxfordshire
stretch almost sovereign-golden.
And when the wheat is rolled in bales
like wheels, and black tractor rills
run to the bare horizon, there shall be,
in the wordless autumn air, Samarkand,
the idea of Samarkand.
From Thumbscrew No 12 (Winter 1998/9)
Камень. Камены.
A swan engages in self-reflection.
The gardens of Leto do not commemorate Niobe.
Riven, the vernal ice drifts on the Never River.
Eva my daughter has a fever. Her face looks thinner.
She ate bread and butter my daughter.
She wants me to lie next to her, so that she may grab onto the sides of my head
and drift off to sleep.
Vater. Water.
She wakes up, goes to peepee. I hold her over the bowl.
I try to wrap her in a bathrobe. No, I’m schwitzing. I do not need it.
I’m not cold, I’m wet.
She sneezes, a Popel hanging out of her nose. Der Popel, but die Pappel.
Ich sah meine Pappel, and so on.
She “reads” Asterix and is delighted when I tell her that Ave is Eva
spelled backwards.
Papa, says Eva holding a brownish apple, schmeiss this weg. I schmeiss it weg.
We live in Berlin.
Rome has fallen, ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying.
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