A Sequence About The Sea And Creatures
To move across shifting borders,
black waters, imagined stairs,
to penetrate crumbling gorges, slow lines of mountains,
landslides, snowy clouds, to find the chosen stones
and arrive at a region
of double footprints, animal habitation.
To see the refracted light of the hereafter and earthly cares,
to eat the bitter fruit under the breadfruit tree
and to grow hungry;
to rise and go, to wear out corded shoes,
to seek a river and come to a shore made by people,
wash hands and hair and drink the low tide
and dream heavy dreams about the last judgement:
to be allowed to start again from a muddy puddle
full of small primitive evil, like Dytiscus or
late man.
To go, to go without taking hold of anything
through dirt and snow, alternating heat
and harsh past and ice age,
that which was, and that which is to come;
to sleep in the snow and make a melt-hole with one’s body
in the great common ice-field,
to learn the skill of hands, slow hope,
to build a house from sticks and let the rains come,
to find a worn path and kicked stones,
the mute density of stone; also people,
and to hate one’s neighbour as oneself;
to eat pine cones and the food of birds,
to share one’s meals with the animals
and learn their parables and language and rapid footprints.
To learn their parables, and confuse them with bodily things,
to learn the secrets, and forget them again,
to lose knowledge
on the journey through time and layered records,
obscure stone books and missing dynasties.
To become empty and give up superstition, belief
that is wisdom, inherited from the animals,
from all anguished hearts
and from bound plants before turning into animals.
To become empty and to give up -
how heavy is the journey without a burden,
the loneliness without the company of the beasts,
the difference that the wolves flee and fear.
To arrive at last
light, tired,
without words, tent or the sympathy of the animals
at the sea-shore, to see with one’s body all this:
The congealing light and the long, stern waves,
the hard space, that circles, howls,
and the slowly freezing winds;
to send, out of habit,
an empty boat, a cry in the wind
knowing that only fragments will get there,
or nothing.
II (SHELLS)
Not a breath.
Only the polished stones
along the edge of the glacier.
Corpses of boats, sails of animals,
trilobites, weather-driven bones,
small preserved death.
Inkless fish,
writing in chalk,
flowers that are animals, stars that are animals,
animals that are boats, corals that are brains,
printed anxiously in the chalk,
dreaming, microscopically,
for lingering memoranda:
How close are the periods,
Silurian, Triassic, Jurassic, the dead Cambrian,
how far this moment, the present,
that avoids the immanent and reaches down
for Mesozoic dreams,
if they are dreams -
The shells are abandoned, and the houses tumbled down.
The stones are lonely,
the prehistoric birds
have been resurrected,
the frightened birds drag themselves
along the shell of the sky
and cry with petrified voices of prophecy.
The birds of the earth
freeze slowly, patiently
in the windy branches,
their beaks bony flutes without sound.
The only memories
of ordered notes
are slender shells,
scallops with broken hinges -
the small doors are open and lead to empty
rooms without microscopic music,
the empty murmuring chambers
no longer eat, make no pilgrimages.
Absent
is the crawling slime and spirit.
III (LATE BOOKS)
Turn the stone page and there
are the deep frozen complex buds,
the chapters of eyes.
The thousand-eyed tree, the reason for the flower and for the plant’s body,
the reason for spreading and soughing and filling the land with abundance
that rots or is perhaps reaped
like prey.
Turn the pages, in them is the reason for the trembling runner,
the reason for the trotting cloven hooves, the horns, the idea
of the horn-eye,
the reason to flee like a mountain goat, to fly with the wind,
to hear with one’s whole body the rustling danger,
to smell it on the wind and taste it
in inhabited puddles.
To see the dense stones and the danger pulsing in them,
which is set, and strikes home,
for behind come the artful creatures, that
have freed their hands and risen on two feet,
they are five-toed creatures, they
have large, heavy skulls and heavy brains,
and elongated limbs like those of the gorilla,
they are the industrious creatures, and thrifty,
at their waists they gather little heads
that rattle pleasantly in the wind
and bring good fortune, not bad fortune
as long as they go on rattling, bony trinkets,
they are the assiduous creatures, they have capable fingers
that can count to five and tauten a string,
not for music but for murder,
they adorn themselves with the numbers of killing and good luck
and sharpen stones into precise arrowheads,
in which is the throbbing reason for destruction
released from the stone
to sleep in the stone.
IV (GAMES OF THE MOON)
The moon is consumed and renews himself
and hoists slow sails,
glides, lending light and wind,
sheds his strength, pulls the oceans;
the earth yields like a woman, and gives birth much.
Plants grow, and nails and hair,
dogs howl on the hills, the dead in their graves,
and there is much murder with various weapons,
words and oozing knives.
They are consumed like the moon,
and are no longer renewed,
but in the moonlight
it is easy to die and to rise,
to cast off in a vessel, if the moon is a boat,
to cast spells, if a drum is the moon,
for the forms of the moon are highly inconstant,
he is a windy moon and voices and a moon of drums,
he is a seed and an eye and a Moon-that-makes-wane,
the setting memory of space.
V (O DARKNESS)
If they wanted freedom
the earth’s, the sea’s creators, the slow birthgivers,
then why did they draw not birds
but fish, bladderwrack, sea-sponges, the undersides of feet,
rat, musquash, for which traps are set,
and pedestrians with choking lungs
and brains, that branch like coral
and know no more.
O darkness, which swallows everything; animals’ cries for help
that are dragged slowly through creation;
what God created this deformed Grace? was it God?
what God created these deformed people? was it Satan?
people, greedy for Grace, cruel to animals,
great in Reason, small in Mind.
Pray for the animals, you who pray,
who beg for Grace, Success and Peace,
into them, too, has flowed the immanent Spirit,
they too are souls, more whole than you,
and clear, brave, beautiful;
and if we begin from the beginning, who knows,
we shall be able to share these sufferings, too,
simpler, harsher, more infinite than ours.
VI (APATHY)
The journey from Satan to God
has grown shorter,
the peaks worn down
and the chasms
full of rubble.
Flat. Brown.
Only the heat quivers
and envelops everything
like a torrid repugnance.
The brain suffers,
not much,
like an oyster perhaps.
We make our way along the edge of the void.
Legions of ants
attack and are defeated.
Philistines.
St Scarabeus rolls
for the greater glory of God.
We see all this,
we make our way,
holding hands,
I
and the other.
VII (PROPHETIC WORDS LIKEWISE)
We are sailing. Already the Hellespont
is shimmering.
The sun is spreading into the sea
like a blood-sacrifice.
Magic and smoky
oracular utterances
receive their due honour, future knowledge.
The polytheistic temples
murmur prayers.
Only the hills, the loins
dream of peace,
not fruit.
The gastropods have united with the stone.
The lazy bodies of crocodiles
are nailed to the rock
by hot jaws and impatient tails.
The greedy throats
catch only swallows, music.
Too late.
Chalk is already flowing in their claws.
They turn to stone.
Prophetic words likewise.
But when night comes,
Poseidon spurs the monsters
and drives them on their journey.
Nothing is dead.
The stone flows,
the atoms are visited by wind and storms.
The reins are freed, and movement, and power.
The nursing bird spreads her wings
and covers crawling souls
sucking mouths and fumbling brains.
The word is in preparation.
Humans
mammals multivertebrates
go on procreating with difficulty
embarrassed, pondering what will come.
Eeva-Liisa Manner -- from This Journey [Tämä matka] (1956)
translation © 2011 David McDuff and Hildi Hawkins