Hugo Claus - Even Now

of the one who tripped over his bag

of the blind man and the treed cat

of her name in the snow

The traces

of a life that couldn’t be a work of art

of preoccupied

and suddenly mottled hands

and a bruised pancreas that same week

The traces

of loss but no carping about that

even the ivy loses its suckers

The traces

of his father’s coat that was once a tent

for him and his broken tomahawk

The traces

of Mozartkugeln, being such a sweet tooth,

even for Milchrahmensahmenstrudel

The traces

of the fire-brigade siren and 5 Megatons

over Antwerp and the vomiting rats

one hundred dead boy scouts in the cellar

around the corner

The traces

of golden children’s tears: the resin of the cypress

of the tortoise shot to pieces

The traces

of the one who praised fragmentation

even though he clung to simplicity

him with his basketful of answers

The traces

of the dead bodies he climbed over

the mossy statues he gripped tight

the sheep with their false teeth

The traces

in haste, in innocence too

as incongruous as that sounds

(he was a poet for a few years

but don’t ask when)

The traces

of goodbye of course

goodbye to Glenfiddich, toothache, sunglasses

strangers sobbing in bed

The traces

of the one who wasn’t present enough here

and remained unreconciled

in compassion too

The traces

of what was once a poem

mostly a comparison

and now a corpse of words

to one day thaw

The traces

of the one who specialised

in the sheepishness of love

because he saw that expectation in her eyes

The traces

of his singing saw

of a begging tomcat

of the collapsing plastic skeleton

of the sea finally without a murmur

Autumn. Listen. Clicking. Do you hear that deep clattering?

It’s coming closer: in our clothes, in our hair.

We’re lousy with sound. What is this leprous muttering?

Child, it’s only the poets outside with their teeth chattering.

The closer the poets get to their dying,

The more furiously they groan at the stars.

In the morning mist that melts their metaphors,

The poets freeze in their recognizable sports coats.

Hear how feverishly they explain their approaching demise,

Struggling to render their rattling transparent,

To ensure that their widowed readers are moved to tears.

“Oh, our egos were way too obscure!” they moan.

“The times required it, as multi-interpretable as we ourselves!”

And look, they’re crawling out of their souls’ bandages,

Mouths full of wine and cheese and pleas for mercy,

For their prostatism, their plagiarism.

One foot in the grave, the poets suddenly discover

The calming miracles of gods, aphorisms and aspirins,

Of tenderness. For the first time his sweetheart

Can read with her lips something her sweetheart has written.

And before the poets, wasted winter apples

Scorned as too scrawny by the pickers,

Finally fall in November,

They want the neighbours to understand that fall

For posterity. In dairy words, ripening to mush like a pear.

Embittered, they keep listening for the crumpling

Of the newspaper that persists in misspelling their names,

Filling in their crossword puzzles

With anecdotes, anxiety and stumbling love.

But too late, too deaf, the poets realise

That what was dark and dull in their poems

Will not grow lighter through wear, with time,

But keeps on rotting. As unfathomable as ever:

Their homes, their words, the equator, the azure.

The sullen darkness remains as common as money

And as fleeting as death.

“But what about you? Yes, you! Didn’t you also worship

The scission, the seething, instead of the monument?

Searching for an epitaph in every motet?

Wringing an emblem out of every injury?

Didn’t you see your dented ego in every cappuccino?

—“It’s true. Upright yet, I dream of the literal.

Sure. Until the end, those embarrassments, radishes,

Paradises, roses, embellishments, tired comparisons. Up

To this sheet of paper, these corpses of letters.”

Adieu the poets write their whole lives long

And greying like lavender in November

They hang around, gangrene and gags and riddles,

Pathetically begging for mercy,

Like me for the wear on these eyes and ears

That loved you, that love you.

1

His body washed up on the beach

and lay there while the gold drained away

behind the mountains.

In his yellow trousers, in his white silk socks,

in Keats’s poems in his inside pocket,

the only moving things were worms.

O wild west wind,

breath of autumn’s being.

2

His face had been eaten away

by the creatures of the sea.

His spirit, which had eyes,

lips and nostrils,

saw the dreaming earth

and licked her,

breathing in the smells that destroy

and preserve at once.

3

All skin and bones, spastic.

(In pantomimes he always

played the witch.)

A shrill voice. A magpie’s eyes.

Girls at his knee.

And him just squawking

about angels of rain,

angels of lightning

that would come down tonight

on the blue planet.

4

He hated minced pork,

saints, devotion, the King.

But most of all he hated

one man and one woman

and their monogamous embrace.

Black rain, fiery hail

beat down on the fluttering locks

of the maenad wig

he’d put on.

5

There were many thorns, many bushes

into which he fell and bled.

But he always carried arsenic,

because who knows

if you will want to survive

the beauty of inflections?

Who knows if you wouldn’t rather

sink with no farewells

into the seaweed, untamed?

6

He once set fire to Mr. Laker,

the family butler. In Italy

he danced by the flames of a forest fire.

Later, in the shadow, grey

cold, after hours like icicles,

he whispered, “Hear, O hear,

the boughs of heaven and ocean,

tangled in each other.”

7

He ran screeching from his room,

he had seen, O, the fat women of Sussex

with eyes where the nipples should be.

Whereas usually in his wintry bed,

he saw a naked babe

rising from a purple sea.

O, lift me as a wave,

a leaf, a cloud.

8

For breakfast and lunch he ate bonbons.

Constipated from the laudanum.

Kidneys and bladder damaged.

His accents and rhythms

blow over the frozen earth.

Echoes of gods and blackbirds

and blasphemies.

9

He refused to wear woollen socks.

Butter made him gag.

Into Harriet, Mary, Clare and the rest,

he inserted a wine-soaked sponge

to prevent pregnancy.

On the edge of many circles

he wanted to banish himself.

He sank in his grand gestures,

the refusals.

10

When his fragments died,

he was interred as an ode and a pamphlet.

The Courier wrote: The infidel has drowned;

now he knows if there is a god or no.

He bounced the bawd of euphony

on his knee.

His heathenism, a remedy

when winter comes