1. (Indalsälven after five years)
Bare rock, and the winter, made this.
Absence made this, too.
I still go on calling it homeland.
Yes, sometimes I do.
2. (Summer cottage)
Sommarstugan glimmers, already solid with
life. Once I hoped:
min mormor, too, might somewhere
resist the winters
to greet us with trays of flowers as before...
hot from more gainful lands; shy, car-worn visitors.
3. (By Faxälven)
One morning years ago. Near the caravan Kalle
HOW! he would pounce and hoop and pounce
in the squeaking roadside grasses, here flies Kalle
HOW! he would pin that mouse!
4. (A lake on the way north)
Finger on map: Ångermanälven leads, here, into Lappland.
V Ä S T E R B O T T E N S L Ä N. Trees, and
a jagged gap
in the trees, and then more trees pass over the car and file
away.
I woke up, and stared at the map. With what attention you
sleep!
5. (Coffee-break)
And the car broke open with fever
to tumble us out and swim with the mosquitoes
in the air, in the world. Leaping clumps of heather.
To describe it: unfinished, the border where change
grows.
6. (The lay-by)
While we sauntered here
the trees never pondered us.
And what can I hear from needles and sap:
their no joy, no loneliness?
7. (Maria wearing a
logger’s cap)
A hat waits to become a hat.
It waits on the shelf
above the coat-hooks. It changes you
into someone else.
8. (By the stream’s
edge)
This grandfather rock. Dumbly, it takes it:
ice, torrent, ice, etc. Slowly, it wears into a hull.
I’m dipping my feet, I’m making a party.
Every bird and leaf flutters: nothing sits still.
9. (Maria holding an
apple)
Hundred forests ¾ more than that, one forest;
behind each chord of spruce-horizons
are deeper, quieter chords... a pinebranch opens
on reedy, dancing water.
Not one green apple ripens.
10. (Crossing the
arctic circle)
I won’t often stretch to this. It is a real frontier:
northward, a sunny nail rides round midsummer night.
But a good country, also, lies an inch above my head.
There I go straight and handsome; I never read or write.
11. (The lakes)
The long hours fall faster
than an accident
in the days we pay for ¾
the days we meant.
12. (Stray reindeer)
A lumbering bin with flies, funny and pettish;
while the herd ran in a groove on the fell, between mists,
you lay near the dwellings, where nobody knows your
language,
where your antlers are sticks, and your eye a dim beast’s.
13. (Cotton-grass
― Eriophorum vaginatum)
The softness of water but not the wetness,
silky fluff, tuvull.
It chops the air. Bed-linen
grew up from the dark pool.
14. (Derelict shed
― Lainioälven)
There is no building to last. It lives
to be a hindrance when it’s empty.
A seashell though delayed on the gentle beach
trails its home-soul into nonentity.
15. (The bygd)
In the crook of the river’s elbow
grows the human country, a flat pan
smoothed out by the ice
to write your name on, hembygdsman!
16. (Flowery meadow)
Beside the river Lainio
the rainbow of spring
rolled into one with summer
is passionate from hard waiting
17. (Maria walking
away, Nordkapp Express passing by)
The river persists. Behind a single grasshead
it roars under the large sky. You swayed on tufty mesas
in a fringe of the meadow tousled with one-off paths,
and looped with camera-strap, were a swift gazer.
18. (Brudborste
― Melancholy Thistle ― Cirsium heterophyllum)
From long rhizomes seventeen long rods
flare slowly in the warm, damp air; but not for us.
I saw them ―.
pleading in colour like the mouths
of baby birds, or a mouth flushed for a kiss.
19. (Övre Soppero ― Birches)
This has been children’s land: here’s a ball, a clothes-peg;
a plank that bounces over a grassy crater...
And the trees are ringbarked, too; but the twickering crowns
dwell on it calmly, all their good and bad: their own
nature.
20. (Mum and Dad, picnic on table)
After many years...
these are the cups, blue and yellow!
Perhaps smaller.
Taste it. Taste your tea.
The plastic is only a little scoured, it decays slowly.
(A blank screen crackled with faces ― finally
me.)
21. (Inside a hut for travellers)
The walls still tell
the names,
but it’s empty in
cloudy August.
The ash in the grate
remains
from that blaze of
winter quarters.
22. (Me at the top of a pine)
Those
light-starved spruces, pretty, narrow and black…
and
now the last sprinkle of trees, you can board the tallest,
and
walking you breast the canopy; snow has broken it,
animals
come to scratch and scent twigs in a forest.
23. (The view south)
There
it all is. No track beyond that dip.
Try
to take it in: the land that no-one made.
And
no it's not eloquent. Maybe like a child
who
is unconcerned and uninjured.
24. (Mum and Dad in northern Lappland ― their parents)
You, their blood,
have outdistanced them;
it began with that
miraculous cranky Morris
(1960) and you roared
along the sea-front in the rain.
But I won’t do this,
I won’t so outdrive your glories.
25. (The mountains)
Bolstered in the mountains,
I fancy,
lurks undisturbed the
snowstorm’s emperor.
Much is hiding there
that never resumes.
A child makes
outlines on the forest floor.
26. (At a table in grillen,
Mum & Maria, sunset)
Shadows crossed the
golden omelette,
golden pommes
frites, shy icy beer.
In that moment, we
made a hearth, “us four”;
it could get broken,
but not disappear.
27. (Maria in grillen)
Sea-moisture,
bottle-brown stream-moisture,
pine-mist on deep
open sea-slopes.
Evening; your
stovebrown babysoft hair
tangled and tumbled
from the hair-clip.
28. (Waving ice-cream by the fjord)
The glaciers yes they
should be eaten,
sugared with amazing
orange dye.
Something human about
it factories lorries
no it’s you waving:
raw, casual ceremony.
29. (Moored boats)
The gloved fingers of
the fjord jostle the dishes,
and to see the
captains’ temples is really not solemn.
Their reverent hearts
are breaking gladly in town.
We starlings prod
hereabouts, we feel at home.
30. (Grey beach ― last sunshine on hills ― Who owns the land?)
It
is so tranquil in the cool night shadows
while
the sunset still rotates way up in the air
and
lights up Yykeänperä's rocks. We strolled and sat
by
the shore as if it were no-one's and nowhere.
31. (Me sitting in long grass by the fjord)
It was incredible
that grass should grow
and pine-trees drop
fat needles on the path,
oyster-catcher run
rings around us squawking,
and evening boats bob
calmly, this far north.
32. (Fjord)
Starved beauty of
borderland, beach, road,
caravan lots, sat
still on the rough, cool grass
when evening broods,
and closes like an eye.
In a snap making the
ending endless.
33. (View of mountains)
Each morning I live
in the face of untravelled lands
but I can’t come now.
Knee-deep in bilberries and fern-fronds
high up above the
highway and the bay, I’m busy but
each night I sleep in
the grip of untravelled lands.
34. (Rallarrosen
― “the navvy’s rose”)
No trace now of the
anxious, sprawling camps,
no clanking barrows,
no chinking hammer, no men.
Empty land, but
alive. The unsweet roses
threw a blast of
silent plumes after the train.
35. (Birch woods ― Riksgränsen)
We called through the
open door. Yes, it was a café,
and yes, she could do
us coffee, though nothing to eat.
She balanced the tray
slowly across the granite ground
to the only table.
And after all it had a few cakes on it.
36. (Abisko turiststation)
The deerherds pitched
on the high pass. At midnight
smoke whispered from
their huts, on the postcard.
In the “Playstation”
we showered and queued for dinner.
Mum said: “kåtor” and Dad said: “goahte”.
37. (The ground ―
with Saxifraga aizoides)
We dashed our bikes
on the ground,
the wheels still
spinning. The day had begun.
Red, yellow, orange
glowed the streamlets.
Through space flew my
greedily sucking lungs.
38. (Slate rockface with orange lichen)
The boreal zone,
which is dominated by conifers;
and the arctic zone,
which is dominated by lichen.
This is the arctic.
What you see doesn’t really exist,
unless it’s portable
— which this isn’t.
39. (The waterfall)
Water plunges all
together
and comes up
sparkling
and unharmed. It’s
idiotic but
no wonder it’s
laughing.
40. (Maria above the
waterfall, kicking feet in the air)
In the airy wink of
your calves
lives the pedalling
of small, soapy feet.
Your own, and your
children’s. “Maybe soon
I’ll be a
grandmother. Oh, I can’t wait!”
41. (Cold water ― Torneträsk)
Sea ― big enough ―
no access though,
I mean for salt, and
cruise ships.
Sweet scent of this:
birch, bog myrtle...
Sea fed by snow-melt.
Hundred cold taps.
42. (Flinging water)
Oh no. Not now your
hands have found the water.
I know you’re a
damned dangerous woman.
“Our matrons were
lovely. They had to be, or they’d have been hounded out.”
And even so, you
shook talc in matron’s bun.
43.
(Shirt off by the fall)
Unmuted,
my skin rubs up against the world:
coarse
prickles of treeish debris;
swirls
in the air; warm, flat butt of stone;
splish
― two, three drops crawl on my belly.
44.
(Kicking water)
I
looked at the dreamy arc and wished, somehow,
it
would hang up there but it can't. From the moment
it
flares up huge it is failing and kick as I may
it
is falling into the gliding beck, no comment.
45. (Mad picture of
Maria eating pancake)
Kerstin
fluffed up a broad bowl of cream
and
they were ready, they opened the servery.
We
slogged up the hill with bikes. On time
we
delivered our savagery.
46. (Maria dancing,
Lapporten behind)
You
create round a space in the hills and
fill
it forever with something that isn't there.
My
ever, at least. Something I’ll gaze at, old
and
back, oh what is it? But you signed the air.
47. (Hands to the
sky)
Thus
the plants lift their leaves, but we can't
snack
from the sky. All the same, we're quicker.
Your
arms make a yearning gesture, your palms
open.
You discover America.
48. (Yelling in the
hills)
T I L L ! Even the
greatest bomb dies into silence…
Y O U ! How briskly
she folds down the blankets on uproar
F I N D ! and back
slips peace; but crush it baby
Y O U R !! and sing
out – show we’ve more.
49. (Rented bikes)
Weird brakes ― you back-pedalled whinnying;
& angel
handlebars, I slewed all
over the road groping
for gears at knee-level. One plus-point:
springing, across the
blue birchscape, the radiant bells.
50. (Writing in turiststation, rainstorm outside)
As if I hadn’t seen,
dull as a stone
or that bench outside
the window…
Decapitated mountain,
grey fizzbomb.
Tea, trying to write
a card. Glad to be indoors.
51. (Sparkstötting, cartwheels, anchor ― Överkalix)
The last generation
of the old kit
is lovely decaying
among the flowers.
Peasant — aristocrat.
Against much logic
the trace of your
famished life fed my eyes.
52. (In the
cafe/junkshop, Överkalix ―
for Rachel)
Drawers striped with
dust, old annuals, kettles, handles;
a tea-mist forms, but
you’d brighten it Rachel,
you who quarry the
auction browns with warm eyes,
no sentiment of loss.
Everything’s up for renewal.
53. (On the drive
south)
The stitches out, 600
miles of rain, our last wee-halt
in the woods that
smell of humus, then Utanede by midnight.
Back seat dark, still
warm. Dad’s hand on the wheel,
plump with bandages,
roosts... no. ― is bright and
alert.
54. (Brushing my
teeth in the garden)
Dawn sat in the
ghost-farm; perhaps took coffee...
Shadows have pates
now: flowers inch open.
An insect whirrs at
the grille. Peeking out,
the aspen is
glittering. I stumbled into the sun.
55. (Mum in the
hammock)
For two minutes and a
photograph
you put your feet up.
Green morning sunshine.
For eight seconds you
gazed across the valley,
swaying between a
birch and pine, wishing nothing.
56. (Långfil)
Corner snipped, the
carton pumped in my hand,
& the fil flopped into itself in the bowl.
So lovely and white,
my spoon hovered,
a bather on the
brink. Then I dogged it all.
57. (Dad chopping
kindling)
You’ve thought of it
all week, the treacherous block
where the axe clanged
and split your hand.
Now you have to go
back. To do what you dreamt, in shock,
in the muddle of
blood: be calm and it’s gone, you rewind...
58. (Sickling the
garden)
The hip-high grass,
the wineglass bellflowers
toppled, strewn
hither and thither. A rake rasps
bouncing on the
cellar slopes. They drank their saft
and swished, from the
rust-red walls, stray wisps...
59. (Eyes closed in
hammock)
The sun lurches, and
the ground tilts, the red cottage;
you shove off, and go
sleeping on the wing.
Under your eyelids,
the day broadens.
Deep in your shadows,
how loud the birds sing!
60. (Sawing logs)
Chock. I wiped the
saw with a clout of grass,
its hot teeth resiny.
Racked in the shed, all mine:
so long may I read
and dance, so many winter days!
(But their records go
on playing: sap, sweat, rain...)
61. (Washing clothes
in the garden)
Plain flowers,
children, their tiny tops,
tenderly handled,
long gone, long grown out of.
Under a foreign sky,
wringing your socks.
For each past, we
still carry the useless love.
62. (On the bron ― Mum arranging flowers)
You spared a posy and
naturally it’s obstinate;
the stems huddle, all
the worse for the breeze.
Untidy! Your fingers
dab, you’d like to plait it.
And then the shape
settles ― just right ― in your eyes.
63. (Maria and me ― Holmstagården)
Only us. We switched
tables with the sun, and finally
camped out in the
café lawn, in bowls of clover.
Sitting still, we
pivot. The sweeping pine sweeps in reverse.
And now, the building
is watching us over its shoulder.
64. (Campfire ― Norrsjön)
In the flurrying
smoke clutching your sandwich:
the smile of the
lucky one. The flame’s soft ditty
sings like it never
stopped singing five years ago,
and you were one of
my sisters, minding eternity.
65. (Picnic beneath
the pines)
Dad has a dozen
casts, and lands a jack-pike.
My concentration
broke, but the hundred trees
never miss a single
detail. The lake’s latest instalment
narrates all summer.
And then? Well, everything freezes...
66. (Drinking tea)
The patchy
pine-spires, their sifted lights,
their rationed rain
on crowberries, rocks, bilberries —
for ever. Eclipsed by
a totem, bristly pig-face:
all in scented
reflection, I tipped it into me.
67. (Rowing ― Norrsjön)
Over the blind
transom you lolled your fingers...
Far off, a diver
honks — us, too! The dinghy bends
and shies, ruffled by
waves. They are coursing coldly
under the deck, those
songs without friends.
68. (Sleeve over mouth)
“Have I gone too far
at last?” your eyes watched me,
spoilt and shining.
You have completely overhauled
the fizzing ant-hill
and the sunstriped lake, this isn’t the walk
I thought I’d take.
It was nature: but this is wild.
69. (Moss-hall)
Within the shadows
sometimes are quiet halls, bright green
and foodless to go
to. Here moss riots, immobile.
A yellow leaf has
drifted here, presented on a cushion.
A beach, a church. To
scuffle and shriek in the aisle.
70. (Kvarnån in
spate)
From out of the
woods, Kvarnån aired a crush
of yellow histories;
they winked, plunged under the bridge.
And beyond, it
steadies, it becomes a brilliant sash.
They built there:
hard, flat rooms; the hum of a fridge...
71. (Writing in Sveja
café)
Rain blew us in here, among almond cakes sheened
with icing: the commonest things! postcards, souvenirs,
the stillness ― nailclippers glinted yellow and blue.
The tea chinked. Outside, prowling, the rain continues.
72. (Spinning wheel
at Sveja café)
Slowly this spinning
stopped. It went with its people
who one by one lay
down in hospitals and stopped.
No spinning for
me! No mild face, no clasp or hat,
no share in any of
the homespun things they hoped.
73. (Red moss in the forest)
By the way-side, the
wanderer’s pillow:
prod, and a cool damp
rises. I tried to forget it,
but my fingers don’t
forget: for many years
they have begged to
sleep in the free forest.
74. (Döda Fallet ― the Dead Fall)
A sculling water stood, sucked into a braid between trees
and boiling, twisting, exploding in the past,
that hollow place. Bare stones, and the smell of coffee.
A bee hums flatly, crossing the same river twice.
75. (Looking through
a hole in the rock ―
Döda Fallet)
The river’s whorls
left the stone drilled and in two places
ventilated with our
day. You up there, me below.
We shouted so each
could hear the space around.
I’m not a mirror or a
telly, I am the one you know.
76. (Setting off ― hat on back)
Raindrops kindled on an aspen-leaf; unrolling over fields
the sun sharpened each edge of trees with newer light.
Maybe they look now as they really are, living in stillness.
With us it’s different, we launched wheeling on menstrual
routes.
77. (Maria writing ― Holmstagården)
You shield this, not
to keep secret for always,
but to present
mocking and hear with delight.
You dress up a whole
stretch of yourself at once,
to slay me beside the
pines in the sunlight.
78. (Dad and me by
bonfire)
The smoke rose far
off, I hurried to come and stand by you.
Then we regard the
flames and share the distance
you couldn’t help
imposing, when I was born. In the midst
of youth I was there:
you made me, yet it felt like chance.
79. (Bonfire ― smoke and sun)
Leafy boughs crackle,
turn red and evanesce.
Thick smoke chivvies
us sideways. The sly-heap dwindles.
Twenty-five summers
of burning, to make out this garden
a nature with paths,
a hymn of sky and details.
80. (Maria raking bonfire)
Then we scrape it
back, hush it into a calm oval
like a sleeping
breast, a shallow mound.
The trees breathe
again their damp gaseous food.
After dark, it glows
softly and pink, warm all round.
81. (Evening meal in the kitchen ― giggling)
“Men Mika...!” The
beer rushes over the table, fizzing happily,
plates clatter, Mum
and me are convulsed with laughter,
“Dreadful child,” she
says. I am seven years old,
the trees stir in
their beds, soon we’ll sit down to canasta.
82. (The four of us
at the table)
You ran back. Smiles
roamed, like smoke-rings,
our wrists resting on
the table-edge, hands above plates.
The shutter snapped
and cropped half your face.
The only sound on the
film is the clock saying: Eight.
83. (In the hammock
at night)
On the black lawn
your feet thump the ground, invisible.
I’m singing, a few
strong features perch in the night:
the pale
windowframes, a flagpole, pine branches...
we don’t need to
shush: to the north, you can still see daylight.
84. (Morning sun through
the trees)
From out of the
endless woods a gift exhales:
not the first day,
but another day.
That is best. To wake
again knowing how good
it is to be woken. To
know and not to say.
85. (Farms in the
valley ― thistles in
foreground)
After school Mats
still RRrrmms his moped
up and down the home
meadow. He might not go.
A tractor conjures
hay-pills, glossy and white;
you have to work
them, you don’t have the things you own.
86. (Dancing down
road playing mouth-organ)
Dull gleam of
blacktop ― landing hard,
I scuffed it
and re-launched
zigzag, no music but what's squeezed
from my hands and
lips, nothing but my life
to mark the road and
leave it used.
87. (Singing and
walking)
I love you singing.
Then all your unsigned beauty
which stands in
frames around me, that gallery
compacts like a
shock, and from your belly
you cry something
deeper, your reality.
88. (Playing
mouth-organ in thistles)
Noon: the greygreen globes bristle with mauve;
the bees come, thousands browsing, on every roadside
the sugar of summer grows tautly, walls of it
shimmer across the valley where a seed strayed.
89. (T-junction)
The roads have captions, but not the forest.
You reached across dusty metal, to touch RAGUNDA
20, like wording on a top. The leafy place is
its own tense home, it also may be a bender...
90. (Flowers in belt)
Those yellow/magenta empires broke up into stalky,
tangible structures. I picked samples, I was a student.
It made a bunch, nodding in the warmth of your loaded belt.
Between pineshadows you swung, solid and different.
91. (Indal ― where we swam)
Trees on a
promontory. Around us the great river
massed, penned in by
the great dam.
Someone lit a fire
here once. We talked quietly
(it was afternoon),
ate crisps, prepared to swim.
92. (In the river)
I am in the middle of Indalsälven, and the world.
The huge embrace of water is not clammy, it is complete.
I trod against the suck damwards... or else I ransacked
the still, big surface; with joy in escaping and in doing
it.
93. (Smiling in
shadow of the bank)
A double dragonfly crackled in the reeds.
Chest-deep, my toes nibbled at the sloppy stones,
my mind still swimming. How soon to swim back into the
light,
and be only my limbs again, local in the horizons!
94. (It’s freezing!)
The breath that ought
to be in you is all
flown to the four
winds, and you can’t get it back,
climbing in panic
water and earning in gasps
a pinch of noise to
tell me ― it needs a
shriek.
95. (Sitting in the
river ― horse-fly)
Wet skin looks
untouchable, unscented:
the broms-noise stopped. Ouch, you joined
the foodchain!
Rueful and laughing,
that the broms slapped down so
instantly
and got you. You
snapped your towel, complaining.
96. (Reflecting trees
and sky)
Dammed up, the river
spreads. On its surface
my vision flew back,
reversed and crossed with ripples,
the aspens stepping
down upon their tops,
the skyline cracked,
the sky charged with the invisible.
97. (Flower-wreath on
my head)
I am a fool, but
picked flowers were always a crown
for tables or for
hair. Passed from hand to hand, too.
That was the start of
culture, but not those immortal monuments
we have tasted since.
Just now, for me and you.
98. (Playing
mouth-organ in hammock)
Why should you, up
there in denser and softer darkness,
mother me, bow to me,
you childhood trees?
I’ll die with you, I
promise. Those who can live with it,
those survivors,
may they keep fit on our ashes!
99. (Swinging in
hammock)
Adrift... adrift...
big bird crisscrossing the moon you seem
a fixture, like the
slow grey liverwort on the rock
where I sketched it
yesterday. After packing, you slipped out to seem.
But soon, we’ll
matter less than your lost sock.
100. (Sunset behind
trees)
The sky rustled,
smeared by the wind.
In our absence small
yellow leaves would spiral;
the train sped
through forests, a directory of trees.
We crouched on our
bags, amusing a tearful child.