Afskallede træhuse er der masser af rundt om i Rusland, og Kina, alle med brændeovn – man må gå længere for at få fat på brænde. Forsurede søer lugter ikke altid godt, ved en varm ild skriver nogen om dagens held på fisketuren…
Wooden Buildings
The tests are good. You need a million of them.
You’d die laughing as I write to you
Through leaves and articulations, yes, laughing
Myself silly too. The funniest little thing…
That’s how it all began. Looking back on it,
I wonder now if it could have been on some day
Findable in an old calendar? But no,
It wasn’t out of history, but inside it.
That’s the thing. On whatever day we came
To a small house built just above the water,
You had to stoop over to see inside the attic window.
Someone had judged the height to be just right
The way the light came in, and they are
Giving that party, to turn on that dishwasher
And we may be led, then, upward through more
Powerful forms of poetry, past columns
With peeling posters on them, to the country of
indifference.
Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms
Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless
real.
*
Street Musicians
One died, and the soul was wrenched out
of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows
Under trees. Farther that anyone was ever
Called, through increasingly suburban airs
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
into the way it was, and is. The other beached
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each
other.
So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
Our question of a space of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.
- John Ashbery.
mvh
Simon
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