Hugo Claus - Even Now

Among us, the strays, the strangers,

the ones who never landed, the deranged,

a pale captain has died.

I see the arteries in his temples

no longer throbbing.

His face, a carved paving stone,

has finally stopped moving.

That we are scarred for life

is clear to them, the balanced souls,

the undisturbed characters,

in all their level hours.

They broke his fragile back.

They locked him up with a chair and bread and straw.

They called him mad and sick.

They pitied him.

I will meet him still

under bridges, in the empty train station.

He will put his arm around my shoulder.

Towards morning he starts drilling,

shaking my fibres,

until I scream, Artaud, Artaud.

I see the arteries in his temples

no longer throbbing.

Break the belt of impotence.

Crack the shell of infertility.

My dead greyhound, my ravaged tower,

my bleeding, stillborn,

burnt-out man, Antonin Artaud.

We’ve known it now for centuries,

that the moon is dangling by a thread

attached to heaven, hell or nothing at all.

That the thick blue paint of night

is drooping down into the streets

to wrap around you like a deep blue robe

this evening when you head for home,

dawdling ne’er-do-wells, theatre and recital-goers,

nighthawks, people who are alive,

and that the night will soon be washed away

like cheap blue ink from years ago

and afterwards the pale, pink skin

of heaven, hell or nothing at all

will shine through and no longer pale,

especially not the pink nothing like a girl’s

soft and salty sex,

and afterwards heaven and hell and nothing at all

will dry out, go mouldy and decay,

just as old loves and bad habits,

doses of the clap, faithful pieces of furniture

and bunkers from pre-1914 must die,

with no one’s help, in a corner, on a sandstone slab,

like cunning old crabs must die.

In autumn and in wet winters

there are days when nothing happens

in the house. Nothing except breaking the past,

like breaking a day that’s passed in glass,

like melting chunks of pond ice,

so that its number’s up, the past’s, its number is up.

But the past and today just won’t lie down,

they turn circles on a carousel, joining hands,

becoming weeks again and months and finally seasons.

There are days

that the clocks of every tower in the land

run half an hour slow

and not one of those winter people notices,

and the lost half hours, saved by no one,

ride through villages and towns, unseen, behind trams

and horse-drawn carts and clump together to form a day,

the way that snow makes a man of ice,

a day of ice for the lonely,

for whom every night is holy

like tonight.

It can rain and it can blow,

but the magpie still speaks on Sunday,

the day of dogs and the blind.

Oh, Sun-sham-day.

To the wooden priest in his box

I whisper, For me, defused, deactivated,

deadened, despairing,

this day is no valid reason.

Beside the water where the grass grows

like the hair of dead women

the girls lie on Friday nights,

surprising passers-by with a glimpse

of thighs in stockings with a sailor

in between.

Unshakeable confidence

steals up on you then, oh, Freya-day stroller,

you wide-branching bridegroom.

Father was eating partridge and Mother wasn’t there

and me and Joris were talking murder

and fleeing and which trains to take

when the sun rolled into the loft

and lay there shining in the hay.

Father cursed and said, God sees me.

Joris fled

and I kept playing with the trains

which ran across the floor

on electricity.

7

Tonight, the whatever of May, at nine p.m.,

On the dirt road past the young and rustling corn,

In the froth of the summer rain,

I was misfortunate enough to think of you.

I thought:

If you’re gone, if you desert,

If you want to be dead to me,

If you want to cower in the brothel of forgetfulness

With your arms over your head,

If you want to walk off unnoticed from one day into the next,

If you want to play with memory’s pearls,

Tying memory around your neck like a wreath.

I thought:

Where will be the grace in life’s bird cry,

Where will be the grace in day after day of

Swollen sickening time?

Village of cows and willows,

Church tower and rhododendrons in rows.

In a curtain of rain

In a fold of the sky and in the light,

The bronze mayor sits on a bronze box.

Moss from the palm of your hand,

Rain from the whites of your eyes,

Hedge tops from your lashes,

Hills of ochre from your breast,

And the folds of the whole country from your body.

And the ringed bulls bellow

Through the circle of hay to the open fields,

But the nearby cows don’t make a sound.

Again you say, Bye and Goodnight,

Words that come at me with the crooked gait

Of the tortoise in the kitchen.

The fourteen monkeys in the garden

Cower under the rhubarb leaves,

Huddling together to weep in the rain.

The wire that clangs against the smoke-stained walls

When the wind gets up.

The last cigarette. The smoke. The ash.

We have got 30 years left to live

And then centuries.

The lift starts up. The footsteps in the hall.

I tremble briefly. You’re caged in now

And won’t get past me again.

My woman, my pagan altar,

Which I caress and play with fingers of light,

My young wood, my wintering place,

My tender, unchaste, neurasthenic sign,

I write your breath and body down

On lined music paper.

And in your ear I promise brand-new horoscopes,

Preparing you again for trips around the world

And a stay somewhere up on an alp.

But with gods and constellations,

Eternal happiness can grow deathly tired,

And I have no home, I have no bed,

Not even flowers for your birthday.

I write you down on paper

While you swell and bloom like an orchard in July.

Saturday Sunday Monday sluggish week and weakened days

A still-life a landscape a portrait

A woman’s brows

Closing as I approach

The landscape with blond calves wading a river

Where the season of compassion is burnt

Into the Prussian blue of the fields

Then I painted another still-life

With unrecognisable brows and a mouth like a moon