Tomas Tranströmer

1 The white butterfly in the park is being read by many. I love that cabbage-moth as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself! At dawn the running crowds set our quiet planet in motion. Then the park fills with people. To each one, eight faces polished like jade, for all situations, to avoid making mistakes. To each one, there's also the invisible face reflecting "something you don't talk about." Something that appears in tired moments and is as rank as a gulp of viper schnapps                with its long scaly aftertaste. The carp in the pond move continuously, swimming while they sleep, setting an   example for the faithful: always in motion. 2 It's midday. Laundry flutters in the gray sea-wind high over the cyclists who arrive in dense schools. Notice the labrinths on each side! I'm surrounded by written characters that I can't interpret, I'm illiterate through and            through. But I've paid what I owe and have receipts for everything. I've accumulated so many illegible receipts. I'm an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can't fall to the ground. And a gust from the sea gets all these receipts rustling. 3 At dawn the trampling hordes set our quiet planet in motion. We're all aboard the street, and it's as crammed as the deck of  a ferry. Where are we headed? Are there enough teacups? We should consider ourselves lucky to have made it aboard this street! It's a thousand years before the birth of claustrophobia. Hovering behind each of us who walks here is a cross that wants to catch up with us, pass us, unite with us. Something that wants to sneak up on us from behind, put its hands over our eyes and whisper "Guess who!" We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't know about.

The stones we have thrown I hear fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley confused actions of the moment fly howling from tree-top to tree-top, quieting in air thinner than now's, gliding like swallows from mountain-top to mountain-top till they reach the furthest plateaus along the edge of existence. Where all our deeds fall glass-clear to no ending except ourselves.

I Two old men, father-and son-in-law, Liszt and Wagner, are staying by the Grand Canal together with the restless woman who is married to King Midas, he who changes everything he touches to Wagner. The ocean's green cold pushes up through the palazzo floors. Wagner is marked, his famous Punchinello profile looks more tired than before, his face a white flag. The gondola is heavy-laden with their lives, two round trips and a one-way. II A window in the palazzo flies open and everyone grimaces in the sudden draft. Outside on the water the trash gondola appears, paddled by to one-oared bandits. Liszt has written down some chords so heavy, they ought to be sent off to the mineralological institute in Padua for analysis. Meteorites! Too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink straight through the future all the way down to the Brownshirt years. The gondola is heavy-laden with the future's huddled-up stones. III Peep-holdes into 1990. March 25th. Angst for Lithuania. Dreamt I visited a large hospital. No personnel. Everyone was a patient. In the same dream a newborn girl who spoke in complete sentences. IV Beside the son-in-law, who's a man of the times, Liszt is a moth-eaten grand seigneur. It's a disguise. The deep, that tries on and rejects different masks, has chosen this one just for him— the deep that wants to enter people without ever showing its face. V Abbé Liszt is used to carrying his suitcase himself through sleet and sunshine and when his time comes to die, there will be no one to meet him at the station. A mild breeze of gifted cognac carries him away in the midst of a commission. He always has commissions. Two thousand letters a year! The schoolboy who writes his misspelled word a hundred times before he's allowed to go home. The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VI Back to 1990. Dreamt I drove over a hundred miles in vain. Then everything magnified. Sparrows as big as hens sang so loud that it briefly struck me deaf. Dreamt I had drawn piano keys on my kitchen table. I played on them, mute. The neighbors came over to listen. VII The clavier, which kept silent through all of Parsifal (but listened), finally has something to say. Sighs...ospiri... When Liszt plays tonight he holds the sea-pedal pressed down so the ocean's green force rises up through the floor and flows together with all the stone in the building. Good evening, beautiful deep! The gondola is heavy-laden with life, it is simple and black. VIII Dreamt I was supposed to start school but arrived too late. Everyone in the room was wearing a white mask. Whoever the teacher was, no one could say.

The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over and the grass shook itself in the coal dust. Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams we board the train that stops at every station and lays eggs. Almost silent. The clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water. And someone’s inexorable cough scolding everything and everyone. A stone idol moves its lips: it’s the city. Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings among kiosk attendants butchers metal-workers naval officers iron-hard misunderstandings, academics! How sore my eyes are! They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm   lamps. November offers caramels of granite. Unpredictable! Like world history laughing at the wrong place. But we hear the clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water every Wednesday - is it Wednesday? - so much for our Sundays!

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has taken power. The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven hoists his death-mask and sails off. The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills. The wild geese are flying northwards. Here is the north, here is Stockholm swimming palaces and hovels. The logs in the royal fireplace collapse from Attention to At Ease. Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes, but the city wells breathe heavily. Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas are carried by night over the North Bridge. The cobblestones make them stagger mamselles loafers gentlemen. Implacably still, the sign-board with the smoking blackamoor. So many islands, so much rowing with invisible oars against the current! The channels open up, April May and sweet honey dribbling June. The heat reaches islands far out. The village doors are open, except one. The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence. The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience. It happened like this, or almost. It is an obscure family tale about Erik, done down by a curse disabled by a bullet through the soul. He went to town, met an enemy and sailed home sick and grey. Keeps to his bed all that summer. The tools on the wall are in mourning. He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter of night moths, his moonlight comrades. His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain against the iron-bound tomorrow. And the God of the depths cries out of the depths ‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’ All the surface action turns inwards. He’s taken apart, put together. The wind rises and the wild rose bushes catch on the fleeing light. The future opens, he looks into the self-rotating kaleidoscope sees indistinct fluttering faces family faces not yet born. By mistake his gaze strikes me as I walk around here in Washington among grandiose houses where only every second column bears weight. White buildings in crematorium style where the dream of the poor turns to ash. The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

Rushing rushing water's rumbling old hypnosis. The river's flooding the car-graveyard, glittering behind the masks. I grab hold of the bridge railing. The bridge: a large iron bird sailing past death.

I One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty, the bay's cold grave rose up through her arms and into her life. Her tears froze into spectacles. The island raised itself by its grass and the herring-flag waved in the deep. II And the swarm of small pox caught up with him, settled down onto his face. He lies and stares at the ceiling. How it had rowed up through the silence. The now's eternally flowing stain, the now's eternally bleeding end-point.

Milij Balakirev 1837-1910, Russian Composer The black grand piano, the gleaming spider stood trembling in the midst of its music-net. In the concert hall a land was emerging where the stones were no heavier than dew. But Balakirev fell asleep during the music and dreamed a dream about the tsar's carriage. It rolled along over the cobblestones straight into the crow-cawing dark. He sat alone in the cab and looked out but at the same time ran alongside in the road. He knew that the trip had been long and his watch showed years, not hours. There was a field where the plow lay and the plow was a bird taking flight. There was a bay where the ship lay ice-bound, lights out, with people on deck. The carriage glided across that ice and the wheels spun and spun with a sound of silk. A lesser battleship:Sevastopol. He was aboard. The crew came forward. "You won't have to die if you can play." They showed him a peculiar instrument. It looked like a tuba, or a phonograph, or a part to some obscure machine. Scared-stiff and helpless he understood: this is the instrument that drives the warship. He turned to the sailor nearest him, desperately signaled with his hands and begged: "Make the sign of the cross like me, cross yourself!" The sailor stared somberly like a blind man, stretched his arms out, sunk his head down— he hung as if nailed to the air. The drums beat. The drums beat. Applause! Balakirev woke up from his dream. The applause-wings pattered around the hall. He watched the man at the grand piano rise. Outside the streets lay blacked-out by the strike. The carriages rolled swiftly through the darkness.

This forest in May. It haunts my whole life: the invisible moving van. Singing birds. In silent pools, mosquito larvae's furiously dancing question marks. I escape to the same places and same words. Cold breeze from the sea, the ice-dragon's licking the back of my neck while the sun glares. The moving van is burning with cool flames.