Tomas Tranströmer - Sorrow Gondola

Like being a child and an enormous insult
is pulled over your head like a sack;
through the sack’s stitches you catch a glimpse of the sun
and hear the cherry trees humming.

But this doesn’t help, the great affront
covers your head and torso and knees
and though you move sporadically
you can’t take pleasure in the spring.

Yes, shimmering wool hat, pull it down over the face
and stare through the weave.
On the bay, water-rings teem soundlessly.
Green leaves are darkening the land.

Each on its own side of a strait, two cities
one plunged into darkness, under enemy control.
In the other the lamps are burning.
The luminous shore hypnotizes the blacked-out one.

I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark waters.
A muffled tuba-blast breaks in.
It’s a friend’s voice, take your grave and go.

Outside the window is spring’s long animal,
the diaphanous dragon of sunshine
flowing past like an endless
commuter train — we never managed to see its head.

The seaside villas scuttle sideways
and are as proud as crabs.
The sun causes the statues to blink.

The raging conflagration out in space
is transforming into a caress.
The countdown has begun.

It’s teeming under us. Trains depart.
Hotel Astoria trembles.
A glass of water by the bedside
shines into the tunnels.

He dreamed he was imprisoned on Svalbard.
The planet rumbled as it turned.
Glittering eyes passed over the ice.
The miracles’ beauty existed.

~
The white sun, training
alone, runs the long distance
to death’s blue mountains.

~
We need to exist
with the finely printed grass
and cellar-laughter.

~
The sun lies low now.
Our shadows are goliaths.
Soon shadow is all.

~
Then the leaves whispered:
a wild boar plays the organ.
And the bells all rang.

~
And the night streams in
from east to west, traveling
in time with the moon.

~
The presence of God.
In the tunnel of birdsong
a locked door opens.

~
Oak trees and the moon.
Light and mute constellations.
And the frigid sea.

Her tears froze into spectacles.
The island raised itself by its grass
and the herring-flag waved in the deep.

How it had rowed up through the silence.
The now’s eternally flowing stain,
the now’s eternally bleeding end-point.

Walk past, they are buried. .
A cloud glides over the sun’s disk.

Starvation is a tall building
that moves about by night—

in the bedroom an elevator shaft opens,
a dark rod pointing toward the interior.

Flowers in the ditch. Fanfare and silence.
Walk past, they are buried. .

The table silver survives in giant shoals
down deep where the Atlantic is black.

A blue light
is streaming out from my clothes.
Midwinter.
Jingling tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a soundless world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border.

William Turner’s face is browned by weather;
he’s set up his easel far off in the breaking surf.
We follow the silver-green cable down into the depths.

He wades out in the long shallows of death’s kingdom.
A train rolls in. Come closer.
Rain, rain travels over us.