Dorthe Nors - So Much for That Winter

To reconcile yourself, I thought,

and shrugged it off

and put on the Brahms again.

Thought about the art of loving,

about the art of loving in the right way, the art of loving casually, the art of not loving when you love, the art of loving even though you can’t, the art of ceasing to love what you cannot help loving, the art of loving even though it doesn’t pay, and waiting, the art of waiting,

and then I went down to the street and glanced to either side,

no dogs, no cars, just a couple people in the rain

and me.

Bought an ice cream cone,

walked around with it slightly raised before me,

got wet but didn’t care, for people who don’t know how I feel should stop feeling for me, and if they can’t think my thoughts to their conclusion, they should think about something else, maybe they should think about their own lives, and when they think about them, they should ask themselves if their lives make more sense

and do they? I wondered

and walked home to Brahms

and the sounds down in the street.

Awoke, walked barefoot across the floor

and ate a bit of bread,

took a scrap of paper from the desk and wrote A red elephant is still an elephant on it

and grew anxious about whether that sort of thing was good enough, felt stupid, felt wan, was myself like an elephant that lurches around and knocks things over, but an elephant among broken glass is still an elephant, just as a person who isn’t up to snuff is still a person, and the Brooklyn movie theater is still a movie theater, and the grieving heart is still a heart, and a red elephant is still an elephant.

Took the bike to Damhus Pond, and it was when I had to brake by the bird-feeding area that I thought of my taxes

and then my accountant,

and then I biked home to my receipts,

crunched the numbers,

and This is a condition, I wrote at the bottom of a heating bill,

this is a way of being,

a change in the structure of existence

like the lull of rainy Sunday mornings,

like trampled sneakers and slightly sour cartons of cream,

and birds on the ground that eat from your hand and shit in place rather than flying,

and birds ought to fly,

a bird that doesn’t fly is no longer a bird.

Said thanks but no thanks to a matinée at the opera,

sat instead in the heat as it bit by bit filtered down from the drying attic to the fifth floor,

but Western Cemetery is Denmark’s largest burial ground for the dead, so the living such as I can sunbathe without being seen by anyone but the collared doves on the small plot of land north of the willow allée, and I’m not saying where.

Took off my sandals, and my jersey,

got freckles,

got an urge to bike through South Harbor into the city and hike around the lakes, hadn’t done that since New Year’s Day, which was when he wrote,

I keep imagining how much it must’ve hurt to shoot yourself in the heart with such a big rocket flare.

Stood still on Queen Louise’s Bridge to write down what the old man said as he squeezed his way between a young couple: Just set it down in F major, he said, and went on toward Nørrebro,

and January feels so far away on a day like this, when the clouds form over Sortedam Dossering, and kids with bike helmets wobble along the bike paths while they call to the fathers who have stuck broomsticks in through the back of their bikes so they don’t fall,

but the soul has a long time horizon.

Biked home and made coffee in my Moka Express

and drank it, squeezed out the dishrags, picked candle wax off the table, and I’m bad at being grumpy, but I have stamina, and I’m good at remembering and at loving and forgetting

To be seen as a person amid the January dark

that is no more.

Slept as if someone shook me to see if I were awake.

Went to the pharmacy, where the woman with globular breasts took all the headache pill variants down and explained the differences, and her breasts get bigger and bigger every time I go, because she wants to tell me what camphor does to mucous membranes even though I’m buying earplugs, and I have to look at the inhaler even though I’m asking for Band-Aids, and I’m certain that these breasts the size of floating dry docks started out as ping-pong balls before behavior made them grow.

Walked home slowly,

lay on the bed

and let an hour’s sleep turn into three, entangled in the bedspread like a swaddled babe,

woke, put my socks in the drawer,

told myself the story of when I met the crown prince, again and again,

told it so many times that it got pathetic, whereupon several wounds sprung leaks.

Made pasta Bolognese

and went for a walk through a world that to rub salt in my wounds had turned itself the wrong side out and revealed all its inner beauty,

all that fertility in the air, all that weeping in wait, and I’d taken the long way just to see if the elephants in Frederiksberg Gardens had lain down for the night, and the only ones left were the wood pigeons who sat in the grass.

It might have been otherwise, I thought, and looked up at the door that now and then stood ajar to the world, sometimes merely so it could poke its fingers in my face,

and yet

other times I catch a glimpse within as of a whale rising up from the sea with its tiny good clear eye peering at me, infinitely mild and inquiring after its long journey from the bottom, Are you okay?

Not completely, no, for all that I originally asked for was a cup of coffee

and now look at all this.

Ran around Damhus Pond, with all the ducklings shunted out of the way in the grass.

Ran so slowly that I was caught by a father and his little boy, and Are there sharks in that water, Dad? the boy asked, and the father replied, Might be,

and if he’d looked back he’d have seen me nod.

Couldn’t sit inside for the sun, couldn’t avoid Frederiksberg Gardens, but there weren’t any elephants, only their smell.

Drew a line in the gravel with my sneakers.

Sat on a bench by the goldfish pond in the graveyard,

opened my bag and sat like that: me and my notes and an ice cream from the cross-eyed man in the kiosk, and yet there lay everything I ought to be observing with the shiny side up.

I don’t know if it’s worth it, I thought,

I think that’ll do now,

and then I nodded to the old gaffer who was talking to himself on the bench opposite, and he might have had Alzheimer’s, or perhaps he was about to make notes too, for he nodded back,

and he was mournful, but alive and kicking,

and We should have the courage to keep at it, he whispered. We should believe, lose, love, be lost and again found,

and he looked at me, whispering,

Necessity is the only criterion,

and he whispered, Forget the pillories,

whispered, Have patience and confidence till the end,

and then I took out my pencil,

and it’s possible I imagined it

but I was sure he giggled.

Caught sight of something so small that I couldn’t really see it and longed for it to be larger,

such a little window into such a big greenhouse.

Had to sit on the edge of a kitchen chair and push away the newspaper,

but breathing is a triangle with the point at the bottom and I’m on top, and if I hold my breath long enough my arms will turn into wings.