Hugo Claus - Even Now

“Help me. Make me forget him.”

That night, when she moaned,

I thought of him in that far land

and she heard it and turned to stone.

They carried off the victim.

They took the pimp into custody.

Then the mounted policeman

gave the whore

some more of the third degree.

“How can I ever get warm,”

she cried,

“with this ice-cold snake inside of me?”

The old man sat on the cow

without a stitch of clothing on.

He’d had it to here with the world by now

but the cow went on and on.

That which at night like a will-o’-the-wisp

lightens the skullcap of my thought,

the mother-of-pearl trail of the snail

or the glittering dust of crushed glass

is no church light, no office light

that’s fed

by a clerk, either black or red.

All I can leave behind for you

is this rainbow, this iris,

the only witness to a faith

that has been battered,

a scraping of hope that burnt slower

on the hearth than green hardwood.

And so, Harry, keep this spectrum,

this iridescent pollen,

in your pocket mirror

when all the lamps have been extinguished,

when hell has broken loose,

when a dark lucifer lands, exhausted,

on a bend in the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine,

shakes the pitch from his wings

and says, This is the hour.

It is no inheritance, no talisman

that can keep the cobwebs of memory intact

through the wet, hot wind of summer.

(A story can only survive in ash.

Perseverance is tantamount to annihilation.)

Righteous was your sign.

Those who have seen it can only

find you. Each recognises his own.

Your haughtiness was no flight,

your humility was not low

when you lit your black light somewhere far away

there was no smell of sulphur.

I

It is as quiet as the death of the dead no one knows

everywhere outside of your room,

where you dance all alone like before.

But there too I hear

what you don’t say

the way I want to hear it.

Far from bedraggled Europe,

where the deathly haze will soon descend,

we stare at each other,

almost dead like plastic chairs,

and neither you nor I admits the murder of me or you.

II

Lying on the black rubber floor,

the autumn leaf, yellowed over the weekend.

Greedily you nibble on an ice cube

shaped like a heart.

November comes and brings the bitter half

of the year in with it.

Time to reconsider.

If I were a bog body, would you love me?

Senile, would you laugh at me?

You nibble on me, but not really,

I’m too old and cold for that.

Cupid, a little brat made of cement,

arrives on cue and smashes to pieces on the floor.

III

Mountains with coyotes and rattlesnakes,

in the valley, the stinking cars,

and in the bed with twelve pillows, you on your back.

You too will lose your shine and your teeth,

but not this afternoon.

Although your mumbling has already paled

as you stumble short-sightedly out of bed.

You, once made of marble, with hair sprayed green,

grow more and more absorbed

in a story about yourself

even while listening like a blind woman

for, somewhere overseas, the beep

of the alarm in the watch on your lover’s wrist.

V

What I know on the eve of November first?

That hemp should be sown at midnight,

that last week you tasted of ginger,

that the great cold will descend on a night like tonight,

that you smile at me like a cross-eyed nurse,

that the sun seeds cancer in the lung, the moon in the womb,

that it’s time to burn all the cardboard boxes

from the old days before I forget,

that everyone feeds off someone else,

that you’re like the hills of Carmel,

shining and salty as the sea,

my hobbled doe, my model with a dose,

my nun who hungers for clothes and mirrors and

the orgasms of men who growl,

and that you groan in your sleep without me.

Even now, gagged and bound on the gallows today,

she, who will awaken soon with swollen lips, eyes closed,

was something I knew, and then lost sight of, and how,

but how did I lose her, how does a dog bark when it’s drunk?

Sanskrit horniness in syllabic lines?

Bring it on ,

for me, it’s as clear as a monad:

all seduction comes from seeing ,

from the action of seeing or from the idea ,

or rather the sensation that we’ve missed something .

Even now, her face like the moon and her body like the moon,

young, bitter young, with those breasts and buttocks and ribs.

Love had arrows once, a quiver full, you felt how sharp they were,

a torment, you were sure, for that full white moon of hers.

To put it another way ,

seduction creates a necessity

that had not existed previously

or was drowsing, asleep .

Even now, her chewed-down nails, her chafed nipples,

the creamy thighs and, in between, her vertical smile,

and she who despised metaphysics said, “Ah, honey,

every cell of your come contains both God and his mum.”

“So she exists in a world

of autumn crocuses.”

“No, she is an autumn crocus, really and completely.”

“Sir, science requires categories.”

“Her red pussy, the arch of her back ,

are they categories?”

“Um, yes, but almost abstract ,

like an autumn crocus by Van Doesburg.”

Even now, the welts and bruises, swellings and tattoos,

love’s injuries hidden underneath her flimsy frock,

and I fear this will just go on and on, this bitter furtive

scratching and clawing at her miniature no-man’s-land.

We’re forgetting two things, by God ,

the different ways of being

and the different ways of not being .

I fear that you’re trapped between no longer being

and not yet having been. What do you say to that?

Even now, completely still, she lay excessively alone,

abandoned left and right, a numbness in the roof of her mouth,

and I, as motionless as her in my own cell, heard

the clink and rattle of the chain around her ankle.

“When will you be together?” my mother asked .

I said, “In the realm of King Baudouin ,

when the world will be truthful ,

when the Yellow River is clear ,

in a month of Sundays ,