Dorthe Nors - So Much for That Winter

Slept as though I were two people, and one of me awake.

Called Mom, without whom my nozzles would be shot.

Thanked Kali, whose rage had driven me a small piece of the way out of the fog, this anxiety that reality will fail you, like late-night phone calls, cops at the door, others’ perpetual worrying, and then you sit there and have to insist that you’re doing it right and will manage, but after months of this you’re weighed down with belief fatigue.

Signed for a book and bore it from the post office through the supermarket and home.

Sang the same line again and again

and realized that, just because people aren’t walking around with drips and catheters or lying in recovery position in bedrooms full of empties, it doesn’t mean they’re intact.

Went for a run, strong in the legs, as if Kali had given me some of her primordial soup,

and it’s spring now,

and it is woman’s weakness to believe it’s because she isn’t good enough that things don’t go according to plan (and it is woman’s weakness that things should go according to plan).

Envied all of them who looked as if they were in the catbird seat, on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard for instance,

people I hadn’t heard from in years,

all of them who thought they knew better because they were doing better.

Wrote a thank-you note to Aunt Margrethe on the island of Fanø for the lovely amber necklace she’d sent

and sat there with Kali like a force in my body, for she’s screamed me a piece of the way,

I’m on course to getting smarter,

I’m not nearly as empty-handed as yesterday,

and I am standing.

Went over the coded signs and symbols.

Brushed my teeth and ate my breakfast.

Sat down with a book on a bench in the cemetery and listened to the singing gibbons from the zoo and the raucous sirens in the distance, and wounds are wounds, but not in the long run.

Picked up a dried-out dog turd,

cast it away while I yelled, To stifle things!

and spooked the retired ladies in Park Cemetery, whose dogs leave turds behind in the general offcasting of everything in life that we don’t want to bear around with us anymore

(but the soul has a long time horizon).

Scribbled down in the book’s margin, Diceyness is the worst, and then walked home to go on reading,

read all that which was written there, as one reads a paper on the lookout for one’s own obituary,

read as if the next subordinate clause might be my last, but I didn’t die,

and then discovered myself, like a quiet tremor in the hand during winter, and I cast away anxiety, for that which trembles in the hand one place is certainty in another, and diceyness is the worst.

Thought, If behavior made the globular woman at the pharmacy’s breasts grow, then what might not be growing in me right now? My mind, my grief, my heart?

Ate too many apples,

drank too much coffee,

so I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were going to solve a rebus,

or I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were two people and the other one awake,

I’ll have to go to sleep with legs entangled in something,

between the falling manna and the desert sand

I am discovered, I am,

and therefore can sleep.

It’s not the coffee that keeps me awake, it’s Kali.

Tried to work, but Kali goes around grousing in the corners, jealous and insecure, pouting lips and all.

Did laundry.

Bought new running shoes.

Received a book for translation and leafed through the next month’s work (while Kali grumbled), thought of Grundtvig (and Kali grumbled), wanted peace and quiet, wanted things brought back to earth (but Kali grumbled),

and it isn’t that I don’t like being the goddess of death, but I can’t stand still, I have to tromp on the floor in the laundromat, on the sidewalk, the grass, the ground, I thought

and went for a walk in the cemetery while the clothes were in the tumbler, and Kali cast dog turds, and as for me I scribbled down this inscription from Landlord Frandsen’s obelisk:

Eternity lasts a long time,

and I thought, Everything is so lovely, even the cinquefoil’s blooming,

and then we stood there and looked at it, me and Kali, we looked at the cinquefoil, which didn’t know any better (don’t smite it, Kali),

but then she smote it, she smote it on the yellow petals

because it ought to have known better,

it might have known that,

that this was how it would turn out,

that it would turn out how it did,

it might have known

everything!

Was awakened by the heat.

Went to the flea market on Tullinsgade.

Watched a bagpipe band march through Værnedamsvej and continue out to the Vesterbro quarter, and God knows where they are now.

Was at the home of someone I know and not a peep from Kali, Kali just sat there while we looked at pictures and spoke of the sort of things that women can speak of, sunscreen and our time in the Women’s Army Auxiliary, and in the absence of things to abuse, Kali took the back stairs and skedaddled, so I biked home alone.

Went for a run in the new running shoes,

ran, but fell at precisely the same spot where I’d always thought, I’m going to fall there someday.

Washed my knee off at the playground faucet, where kids were standing in line with their butts bare, and I stood in the back of the line like one of them, thinking scrapes were a chance to be comforted and expecting to pick off the scabs slowly soon afterward, and it would be a summer without short dresses.

Stopped by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave and looked at the birch tree that was planted over his coffin in 1903, bearing witness that Vilhelm Kyhn is extremely alive today.

Felt tired,

let things lie beside each other—

the frying pan, the dishrag, the joy, together with the insecurity and the French press; the shoes; the being inside, but outside, unseen, but discovered; the being hurt and the recovering, present, smarter, potentially happy, and entangled in will; and the dish towel — everything coordinated with a little prayer:

Have patience and confidence until the end.

Ate an apple in the middle of the night as the light seeped in over from Sweden.

Biked into Kastellet,

drank tea on a bench in the shade of a tree by one of the bastions,

plucked grasses and Queen Anne’s lace,

made the dust rise on the paths

and looked at that bronze angel who wants to walk across the water to southern Sweden, and it was chillier this winter, I thought, much chillier, and knowing that is something no one can take from me, but I can’t share it, I bear it with me like a song stuck fast in the throat, like when I was supposed to sing “The Blessed New Day” for confirmation,

and all that love has not been able to find peace since.

Watched a wooden ship squeeze into Copenhagen’s harbor (as if it were long ago).

Watched a man eat his meal by himself at a restaurant on Borgergade (as if it were long ago).

Biked through the city, just one person on wheels among thousands of others on the way home to their own, exhausted and holding every conceivable unshareable thing inside,

rubbed the skins off new potatoes

and set the grasses in a vase on the counter,

thought of blackbirds and other singing creatures,

of all there’s been, and tomorrow,

of my obligations, my dreams, my dusty sandals,

and then that which despite everything still calls,