Hugo Claus - Even Now

reaches us and in our pity-hollowed trunks,

it bears its fatal young.

My soul says, Run,

even if it costs you money and love

So says my soul

But I don’t move an inch, I can’t

Because my soul, the snake, is still mad about that little

black-haired bitch!

An evening like any other. Nothing

to tell me you were present in the world .

I received no notification

I could have missed you

I could have stayed home that afternoon ,

fallen ill, met your cousin instead of you

Someone else would have taken me that night

Isn’t it better to be made of stone?

Or am I glad it was you?

It’s better to be grass

People mow it, weed it and

it grows wild again, never the same .

People say that a man

who has been bitten by a mad dog

sees the image of the beast

in water everywhere

Have the teeth of rabid love sunk into me,

that in the vastness of the sea, the river’s

whirlpools and the glass from which I drink,

I cannot escape your image

smiling up at me?

Marsha said, He’s too old for you. Imagine!

Knock it off, I said. Next thing you’ll say

I can’t forget my dad. Come on!

But I still think Marsha’s great. Lovely, really

’Cept when she gets like that …

You’re old, my beetle, yes, but you find your way in me .

No one finds their way as easily as you .

Wait, I have to do my nails. Now? Yes, right this moment .

Wait, I said .

(“I’ve got him where I want him,

like a beetle on a pin.”)

Dear bumpkin, I won’t be beautiful when I’m old

Hurry ,

caress the eyes of my breasts

Yes, your eyes sparkle star-like everywhere!

And you make me your captive

when you dance with another!

It’s true, it’s true, your secret hair

burns on the lips of your lovers!

But soon (so very soon, my bunny rabbit)

you’ll see them land on the moon on TV.

And what will still be shining then,

there in your room?

The diamond in your ear and nothing else.

This is what I will write:

a trip from Ghent to Bruges and back.

Because I am being written.

It doesn’t rain, it drizzles

in this country in the grip of the past.

Should I emigrate?

No rock or wilderness anywhere unless this history-crazed nation

excavates it and cultivates officers there to keep the peace

and nowhere is the thought’s main seam laid bare.

This is what I was going to write:

a tater for later, a third for a verse,

allegro con fuoco.

But peevishly grieving, the hooked spire rises,

surrounded by clawing clouds and trees like antlers,

under the aluminium sky with, in it, a falcon

or a sparrow hawk.

Tower, gallows, cross.

Now that — from the days of Ursula, her virgins and her executioner—

the plague has been reintroduced

to the cocked and loaded continent

I will be intelligibly resistible.

Left Ghent

— though I, thank God, do hate this town,

there’s not a turd that doesn’t have a fly to buzz around it in the sun

and Ghent has gates that never close

although the Lys reeks of folklore (foreign currency)—

for the town where I was born among cars,

scalpels and Memlincs.

Left not unwillingly,

but with women-trouble i.e. moody

and otherwise not contemplating heavenly bodies

but more the skin you pull over your own eyes

and the disease in which you find a home — satisfied.

Now the rabbits have died in the west

the foxes (giant hamsters) feed on the sheep,

biting their udders and bellies at night.

The sun wants its shadow.

Nocturnal birds of prey (so much softer than falcons or sparrow hawks)

wear lined gloves that cover

their fingers to the beds of their nails.

Like the cross spider’s

simple rhymes.

Left Ghent among loaded smiling postmen,

following the tram tracks

“between channels, many”

and waving to relatives or residents.

Lots of streets offered diversions under skirts.

Low entertainment throbbed in wandering eyes.

Slow down, you, who used to

venerate the moment

and now return to perhaps, therefore and but

and will soon believe in Nature like a newspaper.

Cat people sleep away their days and hunt at night,

the birdman wakes before dawn,

I am the toad and nowhere to be found

unless you drag the pond

or beat the grass.

The houses here are grey and crenelated,

their skin recalls a woman with

the pox. Renovation only speeds

the rot. The houses here are dead and

tortured The residents shack up in them

quite happily.

Like using a scalpel

to search a vagina

for a foetus.

Stefan George in Heidelberg: You can ask me

to eat bread that has been adulterated

with a large amount of bark .

That’s acceptable .

But there are situations in which one must say ,

“No, not that. I would rather die.”

(Which? He doesn’t hesitate,

a mountain wind blows,

the poet shines on a boy like the sun.)

“For instance .

If one were obliged to eat rats or mice.”

At that time (in the Bagne of Toulon)

they dyed the Zouaves’ trousers

crimson.

Near South Station, in the Telstar, the card-players sit,

silhouetted sharply against the day.

Present are: Horsedick and Hadji Baba (because of his slanty eyes)

Gaspipe (for bashing passers-by) Snowwhite (four years suspended

sentence) and Bugs (who scratches)

cadaverous, sordid,

the weavers’ shady descendants, joking

and hoping for a guardian angel to bring

them stunning luck and Sundays

(when they give the cards a rest)

udders.

In the Advanced Book Shop,

as academic as the lost Hebrew word in

Isaiah Two Six, as dark as Yahweh,

the toads are mating.

Her underneath, dropsical, with eyes of mud and chlorine,

and on her shoulders,

struggling yet motionless,

the father (like a suckling).

Blocked yet balanced.

No peat smoke can bother them. Gender is absent,

inflection and conjugation.

Then like a moral lesson, a celebration,

he moves, almost falls, gives a bitter belch and shudders. A tic.

Respect makes women thin. He moves no more.

Like the lure of your hedgehog

among plaster prickles.

Left for Bruges. The year has taken off its coat.

Rode through the countryside under azure skies, paling.