Hugo Claus - Even Now

at the noon of midnight?”

Even now, I remember how, in the morning, tired and slow

after making languid love, she hung her head almost shyly,

a duck that slid over the lake and nipped at the water,

before diving down and biting me and then never again.

You could also say, “The roots seek what’s clammy ,

the blades find the sun

and the plant forms itself

between two equilibriums ,

between one longing and the other.”

Even now, I tie her pitch-black hair up in cocky

combs, plumes and quills and worship her as a totem

and a cross in my house that quickly, awkwardly

transforms into a temple to Love, the furtive goddess.

Soldiers painted a cross

on their shields and won the battle .

But you’re in thrall to a game

where only losing counts .

Even now, all those rooms and nights and creamy nakedness

and all that sleeping after and before and the smell of heather.

How she snored when I asked if she was happy now and how

she stroked the bolster that had ended up between us.

Until the eighth century

one kissed the Pope’s hand .

But then there was a woman who kissed his hand

and wouldn’t let go .

That very night the Pope chopped that hand off .

That’s why one now kisses his feet .

Even now, her limbs, all four of them at work, exhausted,

and her freshly-washed hair hanging down over her warm cheeks

as she grabbed my neck with her ankles, a giggling executioner,

beheaded, presenting me with the cool and glistening wound.

Just as the cell shapes itself to its minuscule prey ,

obeying that which it will consume

and warming itself on its pseudopods ,

uniting with it .

Admit it, admiration is called for .

Even now, I raise a flag and put my arms up in the air,

crying, “Comrade!” But she was the one who surrendered.

Because on the battlefield I heard her splutter and rage

in her mother’s accent, uttering filthy syllables.

Love, cinders and scrap metal ,

bread and water

love, wake up

and approach from the void

that freezes me .

Even now, when I am on the verge of crossing over

to that other life, she leads me as through black water,

ogling me and leering at me through her dangerous lashes,

laughing at me as I, drenched through, ascend her golden bank.

Above all else, without exception ,

the forest path we follow is a labyrinth .

Even now, her body is carmine and gleaming with sweat,

her openings all smooth and slippery with baby oil.

Yet what I know of her remains a strange gesture,

a thing with no echo, full of bitterness, chance and remorse.

Professor Policard said, “It’s so hot!

I have the impression a certain heaviness

has entered our synapses ,

that in weather like this our neurons swell.”

Even now, I forget about the gods and their ministers,

she is the one who shatters, condemns and forgets me,

she, who is of all seasons but especially the winter,

growing colder and more beautiful the more I die.

Why don’t you say anything about the coldness of silence?

The self-satisfied destructive silence of Ajax ,

Iole, Niobe, Achilles, you name it ,

all prayers I wrote in my dotage

despite knowing better .

Even now, among all women there is not one like her,

not one whose furious mouth surprised me so much.

My foolish soul would tell of her if it were able,

but my soul has been plundered and razed to the ground.

And with the self-assurance of sleepwalkers

we keep skirting the issue .

Even now, how she quivered with exhaustion and whispered,

“Why are you doing this? I will never let you go, my king.”

There was no colder monarch than me and recklessly

I showed her how the King’s one eye was watering.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek to the President of the Royal

Society in November 1677:

“What I investigate is only what ,

without sinfully defiling myself ,

remains as a residue after conjugal coitus.”

Even now, when I dare to think of my lost bride,

my legs tremble beneath me imagining who plucks her now,

my wandering oleander of a bride who won’t stop tearing

the weed that I am out of her garden of delight.

If you dare to think? Although while

constructing a consistent image

of your lady ,

you forget time, mass and velocity!

Strange. Eros: a blind photographer .

Even now, with the bees of death swarming around me

I taste the honey of her belly and hear the buzz

of her orgasm and stare at the moist rose

petals of her pulsing carnivorous flower.

These symbols are multiplying

at an alarming rate. They’re a threat to existence itself .

Can’t the babbling in our tower of Babel

be a little clearer?

Maybe you should limit your writing ,

do it on the wall .

Even now, our wide bed that reeks of her and her armpits,

our pale bed shat upon by the birds of the world.

At the bird market she said, “I want that one, the wild one,

the one that can’t stop tapping its beak on that tit of hers.”

It is dangerous to believe

that you understand the least bit of it .

Much more than the unknown ,

you should fear the known .

Even now, the way she resisted and refused my mouth,

lying limply only after I had floored her with my nails

in her breast, and then, while I slept, drunk on her abundance,

stoking me up again like a fire that had long seemed dead.

You can see it like this:

the physical corset in which a beetle grows

is responsible for the mental straitjacket

that regulates its patterns of behaviour .

Even now, her supple breasts lying in my hands

and her lips thick from my nipping, biting teeth

and her chewed-down nails and her chafed nipples,

and how she squinted in the cruel light of morning.

“Now, now,” said Monsieur Paul

“ Speculative thought never imagined

what the microscope has seen .

Come now , le vent se lève. Il faut tenter de vivre.”

Even now, I tell myself that in the straitened time

between me and the Arctic night, she was the stars,

the grass, the cockroaches, the fruit and the maggots,