Hugo Claus - Even Now

and how I accepted this and how it delights me yet.

The beauty

who gives you the greatest pleasure ,

what is her purpose?

At most she’ll scare the fish

when she jumps in the water .

Even now, how to describe her, what to compare her to?

Until I’m in my grave I will arrange her and paint her

and spoil her and, head spinning, blow her back to life

with my irritating complaints, my nerve-wracking moaning.

“You can say that again!

But I sympathise. After all natives

paint their faces

to protect themselves from the sun.”

Even now, with her mascaraed lashes and her eye shadow

and her painted lips and her scarlet earlobes pierced.

“I’m burning up,” she said, “I can’t go on, I’ll murder you,

those fingers of yours, nobody else ever, nowhere, never.”

Not seeing something for what it is

is more treacherous

than faulty reasoning .

Even now, she’s still nineteen despite how much she drinks,

and though the tracks of far too many tears have worn wrinkles

in her cheeks, carving through her camouflage and war paint,

the mould and freezing cold of her life without me.

We should examine

her biorhythm, her hormonal ebb and flood ,

the behaviour of her enzymes, blood sugar and amino acids

when you’re not around .

Even now, if I could find her again as a fairytale

from the moon after a cloudburst and lick her toes again,

back on the road with my heart of stone I fear it would lead

to another horribly soppy song à la Cole Porter.

I’ve seen many a heart ,

being a coroner, and I’ve yet to see one

that’s worn out nicely at the same rate

as the other organs .

Even now, her more than the water in her miraculous body,

a salt lake on which a duck would float and stay

and that duck with a dick was me hear me quack! — and she

being a lake rocked me on her surging waves or pretended.

This is completely at odds with physics .

Although physics itself can also be seen as a protest

against the cult of common sense .

Even now, if I could see her again with that short-sighted look

of hers, heavier around the hips and with a bigger bum,

I would, I believe, embrace her again and drink from her again,

a bee could not be happier, busier, lither and more limber.

Seduction changes us, obviously ,

because we are

titillated, incited, spurred on

by one of our possibilities with that one possibility ,

that spitfire ,

determining the whole

and completely sweeping it, her, us, along .

Even now, with me entangled and knotted together with her,

the Destroyer is at work and scorching mankind.

People of standing are lost and cannot find their way

as after a battle without weapons or winners.

Even now, wearing her shackles and with the bloody nose

of a lover, I say, filled with her blossoming spring,

“Death, stop torturing the earth. Don’t wait, dear death,

for me to come, but follow her lead and strike hard!”

My poems stand around yawning.

I’ll never get used to it. They’ve lived here

long enough.

Enough. I’m kicking them out, I don’t want to wait

until their toes get cold.

I want to hear the throb of the sun

or my heart, that treacherous hardening sponge,

unhindered by their clamour and confusion.

My poems aren’t a classic fuck,

they’re vulgar babble or all too noble bluster.

In winter their lips crack,

in spring they go flat on their back on the first hot day,

they ruin my summer

and in autumn they smell of women.

Enough. For twelve more lines on this page,

I’ll keep them under my wing

then give them a kick up the arse.

Go somewhere else to beat your drum and rhyme on the cheap,

somewhere else to tremble in fear of twelve readers

and a critic who’s asleep.

Go now, poems, on your light feet,

you haven’t stamped hard on the old earth,

where the graves grin at the sight of their guests,

one body piled on the other.

Go now and stagger off to her

who I don’t know.

That almost everything attains perfection

for just a little moment and then snuffs out

accords with both the world and Einstein’s theory.

And that people grow like plants

under a single polluted sky

and decay together equally in memory

is guaranteed by the selfsame time

that’s breathing down my neck.

That’s why I must now desperately

sing the praises of that one night

I saw you on display,

your youthful enchantment unparalleled,

a naked monument with full impunity,

toppling over before my sight.

I thought (I’m often such a swine):

I’ll wait until the winter comes

and carves its lines around her mouth,

or for deceitful spring to envy her

and dig deep trenches in the field of her skin,

then she, like me, will bear the signs.

But suddenly this fall arrived, hazy, bright,

confusing and as blessed as my late love

and you remained unharmed, my love.

I even dared to entertain the thought

that the cold inside of me might never reach you,

and that you will never leave my side,

in horror at my deep-freeze breath. I believed it.

The way a bleeding corpse might still believe.

Sometimes I pray for a speedy death,

knowing that things of value must always beg,

that follies flourish all around

and truth falls here on barren ground.

The missiles of a scandalous encampment

are celebrated.

The laws of a treacherous government

are decorated.

Virtue is exhausted.

Evil is the captain.

Adieu, my swamp of a land

I want to sink like a stone.

So why don’t I do it?

It is too soon to leave her here alone.

When the copper kettle with the ash

of what I was is shaken upside-down

above the patient grass, my love,

don’t stand there like a clown.

Wipe the mascara from your face

and think of the fingers that wrote these lines

in the days we ached for each other,

and stroked you when they were still alive.

And laugh at what I was, and don’t forget

the snoring in the cinema,

the underpants that kept on slipping down,

the stupid jokes and the lumbering gait

that always brought me back to you

to take you in your warm abundance.