Dorthe Nors - So Much for That Winter

Come.

Said, Now you’re going to take one day at a time.

Said, And this is the first of those days you’re going to take one at a time

and stood up then and had run out of milk.

Walked past the cemetery pigeons, and it isn’t that life goes on but that it’ll never stop,

was in the Frederiksberg Gardens,

hesitated by the pacifier tree and recalled Mom standing in a campground kitchen with a Swedish woman and a Dutch woman, the three of them busy looking into the bottom of a saucepan and taking ticks off some kid, and I never offered up even a single pacifier to the pacifier tree on the path to the Chinese Pavilion.

Bought a strawberry ice cream cone and couldn’t grow up, no matter how much I might want to.

Took the words from my mouth and laid them in a small white coffin.

Read in the shade of a cemetery tree,

read page after page in the scent of warm box and felt pain in my tooth,

but that didn’t matter.

Stopped by Kyhn’s grave on the way back, and it was the roses,

centifolia, multiflora, and Astrid Lindgren, and there I stood and set aside everything I hoped for, and it was as if he turned his head from his verdigris bronze plaque and gazed down at me:

Why, there we have you then, woman,

hover flies about your face

and utterly alone.

Stayed in bed taking another’s downfall to heart,

and stones deliberately thrown in the other Zealand blazed through me as if on a sonar, and now I don’t know what I fear most: the sound of bones being crushed against the floor or things that rise up in the air, that which we never forget or that which we brush off, pistols against temples or threats pointed inward, the inertia of sorrow or its release.

Promised to go to Tivoli (but declined the carousel in advance).

Went for a walk in the afternoon heat.

Had to stop frequently to rest a bit, for as soon as I feel alone inside, someone else steps on the stage.

Sat down by the goldfish pond,

thought of Indians, of clear skies and endless plantations. Thought of America, the heat, and another, of how I’d do violence to myself if I didn’t revisit those places that I had, without much success, already afflicted with my plaints.

Longed for the smell of winter’s cottages when they’re opened up in June.

Longed for northwest Jutland and read poems in the shade,

wanted to forget everything I hadn’t had, and which I should prepare to lose,

and chose the music on the lawn,

the soft ice cream and the helium-filled balloons,

the doubt, the sham happiness,

for I don’t know what I fear most, the sound of bones being crushed against the floor, or the sight of a child’s hand letting go of the string on Bugs Bunny

as easy as nothing.

Woke and rattled my arms.

Biked to the Open Air Museum in Brede.

Walked first thing into a house from Fanø, and something’s missing in this Zealandic heath — the local dances, the wading birds, or perhaps just Aunt Margrethe and a coffee machine.

Went from house to house.

Inhaled the smell of a lost hay cutting and the sight of that feathered wing hanging above it all, and I know I’m doing the right thing, and I know that it hurts (but just like birth, such things can be endured), I know that, just like I know that houses no one lives in no longer exist, and I want to exist.

Used a toilet in the section on early industrialization.

Moved so slowly that I nearly stood still

and thought of the future, for you have to believe in it, thought of the past, because I could see it, thought of my memory and sat with it under an elderberry tree:

and taciturnity’s a form of protection, I decided,

pinching off the heads of the wild chives that dangled about in the grass.

Watched a child crying after a run-in with a nettle bush by the double farmstead from southern Sweden,

felt pain in my tooth,

but as we’ve seen, everything’s just a transition phase, I thought

and took Kongevejen home.

Woke knowing I would enjoy the surgical intervention, the painkillers, the cotton wads, the simplicity of scalpels, the body’s transitory nature as the soul’s lacerations persist and flap forever in the wind.

Had my last wisdom tooth extracted,

had my mouth stitched up with needle and thread by a man who said I would heal slowly because my age was against me,

as if I didn’t know that, I thought, as if it isn’t such things that make me stop midmotion in plotting out the future, and if you’ve got something for aching of the heart, Dr. Lars, if you’ve got something for emptiness and loss of voice, if you’ve got something for time’s tooth, then be sure to add it to my bill, but otherwise I think you should hold your tongue, unless you want to hear my philosophy of teeth — would you like to hear it? Would you?

Didn’t get the tooth to bring home.

Had to dismount several times from my bike to spit blood, and I don’t give a hoot, for in the midst of melancholy I am Kali, and Kali spits blood where she lists.

Bought large quantities of ice cream.

Was knocked out by the painkillers.

Didn’t waken till evening, when I sat up with a start: Is this still the summer that would never end? and then I felt my tooth, just because it’d disappeared.

Went for an evening stroll in the cemetery.

Decided to cast away the things that have plagued me for a long time, like my fridge, the failed effort, and, now that I was on a roll, the bleeding gums and inviolability,

but I can’t cast away the human being, I thought, gazing at Snebjørn Gudmundson’s gravestone with its doves and its birthdate in Reykjavik.

Cannot cast away recollection,

cannot cast away Brahms and those parts,

cannot cast away the memory and feeling and loss of my voice,

cannot cast away life, cannot cast it away.

Ran my tongue over the wound, and it was still there.

Sorted laundry, two piles, Tuesday.

Managed to exchange the wrecked sunglasses but could not exchange them for winter, no matter how much I wished to.

Concluded that what from my vantage appears to be the cold could well be something else,

but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering

(and I shouldn’t think that it won’t continue either, for it does continue, day in and day out it continues, this hesitation that has taken me hostage, and it’s going to be the longest summer ever, it’ll be a summer that never lets go, and I’ll end up being unable to distinguish it from last summer, which was precisely the same and kept on being so until the roses closed up from frost in the end of November, when I got the flu and a measure of peace).

Washed the floor and rinsed with chlorhexidine

and stood stock-still at the tail end of the afternoon and issued a sound that made all the dogs in Valby howl,

made the wound spring a leak, made me want to sing along, though I could not.

Went to yoga and assumed boat pose,

and something must continue, though it cannot keep going, I thought. There must be an end to it. What we know and what we see before our eyes must merge and become one image. I want what I hold to be true and the magnets on the fridge to resemble each other, I thought as I lay and pitched in the surf.