Hugo Claus - Even Now

With a spiral like a trumpet of redemption

In the Jerusalem of my room.

No house too black

For me to live in

No morning too bright

For me to wake up in

As in a bed

That’s how I live and watch in this house

Between night and morning

Walking on fields of nerves

And digging my nails into every

Uncomplaining body that approaches

Saying chaste words like

Rain and wind apple and bread

Dark and viscous blood of women

Where later radishes and mignonette will flower

In May that is

In a garden by the tracks of a country train

The wind

Is freezing now in December

And in that wind without light without shepherds without birds

Without any chance at all a foal has frozen to death

I’ve brought it here and put it under glass

I gaze away the days and hours

(That pass me by on the wide path

Of this existence which reasonably

We tread in sin with no great deeds)

And wait until thankful and thawed

The foal looks up and speaks its first word.

We know neither bread nor meat

We sleep on leaves that turn to compost for our stony land

Our houses have no windows

And in our village there are 14 dwarves and 30 idiots

It rains and our levees leak

It doesn’t rain We pray and our earth stays dry

Like our skin

Like our throats that swell and crack

He who is our father is our lover

And our mothers die young

Shame is our portion

Disgrace our daily meal

Our faces are rank with weeds

We look into your camera We are real

And you are right to say, “They are Las Hurdes.”

A gaunt song a dark thread

Land like a sheet

That sinks

Springtime land of milk and farms

Willow-wood children

Feverish summer land when the sun

Spawns its young in the corn

Golden enclosure

With the deaf-and-dumb farmers at their dead hearths

Praying to God to “forgive us

His trespasses against us”

With the fisherman burning in their boats

With the mottled animals the frothing women

Who sink

Land I dawn in you My eyes are shards

I am in Ithaca with holes in my skin

I borrow your air when I speak

Your bushes and lindens concealed in my words

My letters are West Flanders: dune and polder

I drown in you

Land you are a gong in my skull and at times

Later in ports

A conch: May and beetle Dark bright

Earth.

A morning like always your house is empty

We count and one by one the days

Step into the cage

One sees I see you see

The hidden animals in the cool mirror see

This keeps it buried

The knife that rusts the blood that clots

The bricks porous the milk sour

One says you say

With a blinded voice a frozen gesture

Bye

Bye dear children bye.

Bitter tastes the herb of memory.

Artillery, chunks of phosphorus,

Chalky stubble turnips surround the house and who

Is not watching there, unchaste sentinels waiting for the sign

Of the burning bush, of the horn,

Of the helmeted weathercock of hate?

One step and monkeys start swinging, slithering,

Sliding in on fingers,

Forcing entry into my resting blood. Living there swiftly,

Living there slowly. Until it burns in the hay of all words,

Until it burns in the bygone field, the drowned days and

Their fermenting corn.

The singer is not free

But fast and scornful and skimming the peaks like a pond.

He is not free because his transfixed cascade

And worm-eaten wood resound in his throat, tongue and mouth.

Let loose in his skin, this house,

The singer greets neither cuckoo nor bird catcher

Nor the furtive watchers in the low country.

The singer is his song.

There is no me, no me but in your earth.

When you cried out your skin shivered

And my bones caught fire.

(My mother, imprisoned in her skin,

Changes by the measure of the years.

Her eyes are pale, escaped from the urging

Of the years by looking at me and calling me

Her joyful son.

She was no bed of stone, no feverish beast,

Her joints were a litter of kittens,

But my skin stays unforgivable to her,

The crickets in my voice unmoving.

“You have outgrown me,” she says slowly,

Washing my father’s feet, then falling silent

Like a woman without a mouth.)

When your skin cried out my bones caught fire.

You laid me down, I can never bear this image again,

I was the welcome but murderous guest.

And now, in manhood, I am a stranger to you.

You see me approaching and you think, “He is

The summer, he shapes my flesh and keeps

The dogs in me alert.”

While you die on your feet every day, not with me,

Apart, there is no me, no me but in your earth.

Turning inside of me, your life is lost, you won’t

Come back to me, I cannot recover from you.

Dancing or defeated,

Imprisoned in human warmth, we are already slowing

In the thickets of disinclination, in the contaminated fields,

Following on the heels of the mutilated, who whisper.

Their lips dry in the sun, the late sun.

We hear the dusk, we hear

The daily rattle from the scaffold,

We hear the flayed cub, we hear

The Jew burning in the bush and the crippled nun,

The judge’s sisters, god-fearing and voluptuous,

The heathens in the park, the raven shooters and the crusaders.

We hear them all.

A beak eats out of our mouths.

A tropic encircles our blood.

And under the linden, dewy in its shade,

The father lies for days, days on end, unswayable,

Watching his worn-down children.

Between clouds and royal ferns

The mares will ride tonight in the white field

Growing whiter.

Between thorns and rhododendrons the farmers beat

The children who came too soon.

And where the black iron maiden

Subdues me

The tower shudders, the holy signs tremble.

Listen:

“I am the fatal mother, desire me,

implore me, awaken in my sun — I

Will be with you till your breath fails.”

Listen: “You will not heal but live

On the edge of my life.

In sand, you will acknowledge me.”

In a harbour

That breathes like a woman,

Not restlessly but endlessly,

Her body flutters,

And where she swells all buttons snap,

All skins peel.

Where she swells I surrender, foundering in her bucking

Boats, her rising triumph,

Her sinking, slackening, sailing inland sea.

1

Hair roaring with laughter,

Seagull eyes, a pouch on her belly,

A mother or another traitor,

Who knows this scorching woman?

Her nails come close to my wood,

Her tainted claws awaken my skin,

She blares in my hair like a hunting horn.