Hugo Claus - Even Now

and would kill and how!

Shall I ask them for New Year’s? To celebrate together here

With punch and feeble grins? To see the New Year in.

Who? Not those who are too wild, not those who are too mild,

Not those who count too much, but those who tell too much.

And most of all the ones like us.

I will soothe them with booze until they crack.

Should I make them pay? Would that enhance their thirst?

Quail? Waffles? Shall I also ask the self-generating

Toad full of poison gas who guesses at family secrets

In my transparent verse? And the greasy connoisseur

Who sits up and begs at the slightest crumb of protestation?

And that shrunken beetle who writes in his paper so brashly

To deny the migration of souls in my poetry? Ah,

Even his corpse will never crack a smile!

I will invite them. No, you ask them, madame , as

I, homunculus in my menthol cloud of dread,

Am like Mickey Spillane, weathered out of my own desires.

Ah, together we will all compulsively pig ourselves

To a full-blown rectal cancer,

We, miniatures more at home in heraldry

Than in nature. Ah, to greet the New Year with

All its whims and grudges, its freezing cold, we’ll scream

dozens of Quantanamèras and Yesterdays.

Yes, again, again . Shall I ask them?

6 (

On Thomas’s Fourth Birthday

)

Later, my son, you’ll be a man,

later you will yearn to learn the how and why.

They’ll stamp you like luggage.

They’ll hurt you for your wishes and your dreams.

And you will try once and for all to photograph

the how and why of the woman

who turns between your sheets

who sings as you expand in her skin.

And later still, son, your life

will be a scrapbook.

But not for ages yet, no, not for ages yet.

17 ( Translation )

Translated Borges’s Tango today.

( qua propter quod bene factum est in una lingua )

Jesus!

It creaks in every joint, it waddles,

this dirge of a dance.

In Spanish: a hard box with music inside,

a sparking flint, a coiled spring.

In Flemish: a band-aid. The metre slides under the table.

The link to the music is lost.

( non est possibile )

Faithfully ailing, how else could it be?

A Flemish tango on two-timing feet.

I see her thinking: My kisses

are cold tonight. — How she then hurls

herself into that trusted void!

Mechanically prodding me from

her vacuum. — Towards her smell .

I count the steps on the stairs

and then subtract her age .

The number of times the clocks strike

are the thirteen letters of her name .

I tear her like a wet newspaper .

Will I ever grow used to time

that wears us down together?

Or will I, like her, become a coincidence ,

an aperture in time? —

Her slit is my sign .

You lie there naked, but no more naked than at the doctor’s .

Your wound no more naked than your knees .

As if it’s a habit. My own body, I’ve come to see

with different eyes. As if, after all these years ,

the rejection no longer applies .

Your palm glides more softly, you’re starting

to get it. Your breasts are fuller too

after three months of caresses. The dance

of your hip finally echoes our first nights

with all those teething problems .

Close to her, I think: our story is

cold metal, something for half

a day a week, a passing madness .

And I’m just the table leg a bitch

pisses on out of longing for something else .

Getting dressed. Pressing what I’ve worshipped

into stretch panties. Arranging your segments .

You raise your foot & I think

you think I’m a part of you .

Something like an ingrown toenail .

“More. Don’t stop. Faster!” No, she didn’t groan

it, she swore, “Oh, God, oh, God damn it!”

And then, “What have you done

to my face? It looks years younger!”

And then, “Oh, boy, if you ever cheat on me!”

It’s finished. Adieu. Hidden under make-up .

Or rather, did it ever exist? Or is there

a corpse still lying here between the sheets ,

looking like the two of us and panting still?

Her mouth: my lock .

The smell of her cunt and arse confuse her ,

the taste in my mouth shames her .

She’s not that fish, she thinks, with piss and sweat ,

but some other animal, deodorised and in another land .

That’s why she’s sometimes hated by her glands .

Her name which you say and yawning

spell out over and over again, snowed under .

Her name which you groan

until the neighbour calls the police .

Her name which you swallow / like she swallows her pill .

When she sleeps I open

her finest pages and read

the wiring of her soft ,

warm television—

a circuit from her to her .

Ha-ha! I had a heart, I swear it ,

trembling like any other. And chattering .

Truly, it lay there waiting for her .

— She took her iron and placed

it on my heart and pressed and pressed .

“Do you want to?”—“If you do, so do I.”

“Then I don’t want to.”—“Me neither.”

Who wanted to? Who wanted to?

When tenderness is in the majority ,

there’s no one to open the door .

“He took my virginity,” she said .

“Every day I’m scared of him,” she said .

“I can never trust him,” she said .

“I sob for hours at a time,” she said and sobbed ,

“and you, you’re just my lover.”

1

A stick insect

with something feminine around the ribs

an iris in his midriff.

(Death is in my hipbone, the left ,

my jaws already calcified;

once I was as bright as a flower ,

as bitter as blossom.)

Mutant. Transformed from man

to mantis by paternal wrath.