Epilogue

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander

December. Sweden is a hauled-up,
unrigged ship. Its masts stand sharp
against the twilight sky. And twilight lasts longer
than day—the road that leads here is rocky:
first light doesn’t arrive till noon
when winter’s colosseum rises,
lit up by surreal clouds. Then all at once
the white smoke lifts dizzily
from the villages. The clouds, high and unending.
The sea grubs at the sky-tree’s roots,
distracted, as if listening for something.
(Across the soul’s dark, averted half,
a bird travels unseen, waking
the sleepers with its cries. The telescope
turns away, caught in another time,
and it is summer: the mountains bellow, bursting
with light, and the stream holds the sun’s shimmer
with a seethrough hand… All of it gone
as when a filmstrip snaps in the dark.)

Now the evening star burns through the cloud.
Trees, fences, houses expand
in the soundless avalanche of darkness.
And under the star more and more develops
of the other hidden landscape that leads
a life of contours on the night’s X-ray plate.
A shadow pulls its sled between the houses.
And they wait.

At six o’clock, the wind picks up
and crashes with a roar down the village street,
in the dark, like a band of horsemen. How

the black unrest plays about and fades!
The houses trapped in a motionless dance,
in a dreamlike noise. Gust
after gust flits across the bay
toward the open sea’s deep dive into darkness.
Up in space the stars flash signals of distress.
They’re switched on and off by clouds rushing along,
only revealing their existence when
they obscure the light, like clouds from the past
roaming through souls. When I walk by
the stable wall, I hear the sick horse
stamping inside over the roar.
And that’s the storm departing,
by a broken gate that slams and slams, a lantern
swinging from a hand, a scared animal
shrieking on the mountain. The storm rumbles
like thunder over cowsheds, growls
in the telephone wires, whistles shrill
in the roof tiles of the night ceiling,
the tree helplessly flings its branches.

A bagpipe note breaks loose!
A note from a bagpipe liberated, marching
forward. A procession. A forest on the move!
Torrents surge around a prow and darkness
stirs, land and water travel on. And the dead,
who have gone belowdecks, are here with us,
underway: a sea-voyage, a passage
that is not pursuit but shelter.

And the world’s forever tearing down its tent
anew. On a summer day the wind
catches the oak’s rigging and hurls the Earth forward.
The water lily paddles with its hidden webfoot

in the pond’s fleeing dark embrace.
A glacial boulder rolls away through space.
In the summer dusk, islands seem to lift
from the horizon. Old villages
are on the move, drawn deeper into the woods
on the magpie-creaking wheel of seasons.
When the year kicks off its boots,
and the sun climbs higher, the trees leaf out
and fill with wind and sail ahead in freedom.
At the mountain’s foot, the breaking surf of evergreens,
but summer’s long, warm sea swell is coming,
slowly combing through the treetops, resting
a moment and slipping back again--
leaving the bare coast behind. And at last:
God’s spirit is like the Nile: overflows
and sinks in a rhythm reckoned
in texts throughout the ages.
But He is also unchanging
and therefore seldom observed here.
He crosses the procession from the side.

Like a ship passing through the fog
without the fog noticing a thing. Silence.
The lantern’s faint glow is the signal.

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