Alphabet Read online




  Contents

  1 [a] apricot trees

  2 [b] bracken

  3 [c] cicadas

  4 [d] doves

  5 [e] early fall

  6 [f] fisherbird herons

  7 [g] given limits

  8 [h] whisperings

  9 [i] ice ages

  10 [j] June nights

  atom bombs

  11 [k] love

  somewhere

  fragment

  hydrogen bombs

  12 [l] life

  in mid-November

  snow

  don’t panic

  from a train

  cobalt bombs

  13 [m] metal

  layered light

  as if

  it’s new for me

  following the sleepwalkers

  defoliants

  alphabets

  14 [n] nights

  so here I stand

  the Gävle canal

  there’s something specific

  dreamers

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The length of each section of Inger Christensen’s

  alphabet is based on Fibonacci’s sequence,

  a mathematical sequence beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,

  13, 21…, in which each number is the sum of

  the two previous numbers.

  1

  apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

  2

  bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;

  bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

  3

  cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,

  citrus trees; cicadas exist;

  cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

  4

  doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;

  killers exist, and doves, and doves;

  haze, dioxin, and days; days

  exist, days and death; and poems

  exist; poems, days, death

  5

  early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;

  seclusion and angels exist;

  widows and elk exist; every

  detail exists; memory, memory’s light;

  afterglow exists; oaks, elms,

  junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;

  eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar

  exist, and the future, the future

  6

  fisherbird herons exist, with their grey-blue arching

  backs, with their black-feathered crests and their

  bright-feathered tails they exist; in colonies

  they exist, in the so-called Old World;

  fish, too, exist, and ospreys, ptarmigans,

  falcons, sweetgrass, and the fleeces of sheep;

  fig trees and the products of fission exist;

  errors exist, instrumental, systemic,

  random; remote control exists, and birds;

  and fruit trees exist, fruit there in the orchard where

  apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

  in countries whose warmth will call forth the exact

  colour of apricots in the flesh

  7

  given limits exist, streets, oblivion

  and grass and gourds and goats and gorse,

  eagerness exists, given limits

  branches exist, wind lifting them exists,

  and the lone drawing made by the branches

  of the tree called an oak tree exists,

  of the tree called an ash tree, a birch tree,

  a cedar tree, the drawing repeated

  in the gravel garden path; weeping

  exists as well, fireweed and mugwort,

  hostages, greylag geese, greylags and their young;

  and guns exist, an enigmatic back yard;

  overgrown, sere, gemmed just with red currants,

  guns exist; in the midst of the lit-up

  chemical ghetto guns exist

  with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision

  guns and wailing women, full as

  greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists;

  the scene of the crime, drowsy, normal, abstract,

  bathed in a whitewashed, godforsaken light,

  this poisonous, white, crumbling poem

  8

  whisperings exist, whisperings exist

  harvest, history, and Hailey‘s

  comet exist; hosts exist, hordes

  high commanders, hollows, and within the hollows

  half-shadows, within the half-shadows occasional

  hares, occasional hanging leaves shading the hollow where

  bracken exists, and blackberries, blackberries

  occasional hares hidden under the leaves

  and gardens exist, horticulture, the elder tree’s

  pale flowers, still as a seething hymn;

  the half-moon exists, half-silk, and the whole

  heliocentric haze that has dreamed

  these devoted brains, their luck, and human skin

  human skin and houses exist, with Hades

  rehousing the horse and the dog and the shadows

  of glory, hope; and the river of vengeance;

  hail under stoneskies exists, the hydrangeas’ white, bright-shining, blue or greenish

  fogs of sleep, occasionally pink, a few

  sterile patches exist, and beneath

  the angled Armageddon of the arching heavens, poison,

  the poison helicopter’s humming harps above the henbane,

  shepherd’s purse, and flax, henbane, shepherd’s purse

  and flax; this last, hermetic writing,

  written otherwise only by children; and wheat,

  wheat in wheatfields exists, the head-spinning horizontal knowledge of wheatfields, half-lives,

  famine, and honey; and deepest in the heart,

  otherwise as ever only deepest in the heart,

  the roots of the hazel, the hazel that stands

  on the hillslope of the heart, tough and hardy,

  an accumulated weekday of Angelic orders;

  high-speed, hyacinthic in its decay, life,

  on earth as it is in heaven

  9

  ice ages exist, ice ages exist,

  ice of polar seas, kingfishers’ ice;

  cicadas exist, chicory, chromium

  and chrome yellow irises, or blue; oxygen

  especially; ice floes of polar seas also exist,

  and polar bears, stamped like furs with their

  identification numbers, condemned to their lives;

  the kingfisher’s miniplunge into blue-frozen

  March streams exists, if streams exist;

  if oxygen in streams exists, especially

  oxygen, especially where cicadas’

  i-sounds exist, especially where

  the chicory sky, like bluing dissolving in

  water, exists, the chrome yellow sun, especially

  oxygen, indeed it will exist, indeed

  we will exist, the oxygen we inhale will exist,

  lacewings, lantanas will exist, the lake’s

  innermost depths like a sky; a cove ringed

  with rushes, an ibis will exist,

  the motions of mind blown into the clouds

  like eddies of oxygen deep in the Styx

  and deep in the landscapes of wisdom, ice-light,

  ice and identical light, and deep

  in the ice-light nothing, lifelike, intense

  as your gaze in the rain; this incessant,

  life-stylising drizzle, in which like a gesture

  fourteen crystal forms exist, seven

  systems of crystals, your gaze as in mine,

  and Icarus, Icarus helpless;

  Icarus wrapped in the melting wax

  wings exists
, Icarus pale as a corpse

  in street clothes, Icarus deepest down where

  doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;

  the dreamers, their hair with detached

  tufts of cancer, the skin of the dolls tacked together

  with pins, the dryrot of riddles; and smiles,

  Icarus-children white as lambs

  in greylight, indeed they will exist, indeed

  we will exist, with oxygen on its crucifix,

  as rime we will exist, as wind,

  as the iris of the rainbow in the iceplant’s gleaming

  growths, the dry tundra grasses, as small beings

  we will exist, small as pollen bits in peat,

  as virus bits in bones, as water-thyme perhaps,

  perhaps as white clover, as vetch, wild chamomile,

  banished to a re-lost paradise; but the darkness

  is white, say the children, the paradise-darkness is white,

  but not white the same way that coffins

  are white, if coffins exist, and not white

  the same way that milk is white, if milk exists;

  white, it is white, say the children,

  the darkness is white, but not

  white like the white that existed

  when fruit trees existed, their blossoms so white,

  this darkness is whiter; eyes melt

  10

  June nights exist, June nights exist,

  the sky at long last as if lifted to heavenly

  heights, simultaneously sinking, as tenderly as

  when dreams can be seen before they are dreamed; a space

  as if dizzied, as if filled with whiteness, an hourless

  chiming of insects and dew, and no one in

  this gossamer summer, no one comprehends that

  early fall exists, aftertaste, afterthought;

  just these reeling sets of restless ultrasounds

  exist, the bat’s ears of jade

  turned toward the ticking haze;

  never has the tilting of the planet been so pleasant,

  never the zinc-white nights so white,

  so defencelessly dissolved, gently ionized and

  white, never the limit of invisibility so nearly

  touched; June, June, your Jacob’s ladders,

  your sleeping creatures and their dreams exist,

  a drift of galactic seed between

  earth so earthly and sky so heavenly,

  the vale of tears so still, so still, and tears

  sinking, sinking like groundwater back

  into earth; Earth; Earth in its trajectory

  around the sun exists, Earth on its journey

  along the Milky Way, Earth on its course with

  its cargo of jasmine, jasper, iron,

  iron curtains, omens, jubilation, Judas’s kiss

  kissed right and left, and virgin anger in

  the streets, Jesus of salt; with the shadow of the

  jacaranda over the river, with gyrfalcons, jet planes,

  and January in the heart, with Jacopo della Quercia’s

  well Fonte Gaia in Siena and with July

  heavy as a bomb, with domestic brains

  heart defects, quaking grass and strawberries

  the ironwood‘s roots in the earthworn earth

  Earth sung by Jayadeva in his mystical

  poem from the 12th century, Earth with

  the coastline of consciousness blue, with nests where

  fisherbird herons exist, with their grey-blue arching

  backs, or where bitterns exist, cryptic

  and shy, or night herons, egrets,

  with the wingbeat variations of hedge sparrows, cranes

  and doves; Earth exists with Jullundur, Jabalpur and

  the Jungfrau, with Jotunheim, the Jura,

  with Jahrun, Jambo, Jogjakarta,

  with duststorms, Dutchman’s breeches

  with water and land masses jolted by tremors

  with Judenburg, Johannesburg, Jerusalem’s Jerusalem

  atom bombs exist

  Hiroshima, Nagasaki

  Hiroshima, August

  6th, 1945

  Nagasaki, August

  9th, 1945

  140,000 dead and

  wounded in Hiroshima

  some 60,000 dead and

  wounded in Nagasaki

  numbers standing still

  somewhere in a distant

  ordinary summer

  since then the wounded

  have died, first many,

  most, then fewer, but

  all; finally

  the children of the wounded

  stillborn, dying

  many, forever a

  few, at last the

  last; I stand in

  my kitchen peeling

  potatoes; the tap

  runs, almost

  drowning out the

  children in the yard;

  the children shout,

  almost drowning out

  the birds in the

  trees; the birds

  sing, almost

  drowning out the whisper

  of leaves in the wind;

  the leaves whisper,

  almost drowning

  the sky with silence,

  the sky with its light

  and the light that almost

  since then has recalled

  atomic fire

  a bit

  11

  love exists, love exists

  your hand a baby bird so obliviously tucked

  into mine, and death impossible to remember,

  impossible to remember how inalienable

  life, as easily as chemicals drifting

  over the knotgrass and rock doves, all of it

  is lost, vanishing, impossible to remember that

  there and there flocks of rootless

  people, livestock, dogs exist, are vanishing;

  tomatoes, olives vanishing, the brownish

  women who harvest them, withering, vanishing,

  while the ground is dusty with sickness, a powder

  of berries and leaves, and the buds of the caper

  are never gathered, pickled with salt

  and eaten; but before they vanish, before we vanish, one evening we sit at the table with

  a little bread, a few fish without cankers, and water

  cleverly turned into water, one of

  history’s thousands of war paths suddenly

  crosses the living room, you get up, limits,

  given limits exist, streets, oblivion

  everywhere, but your hideout comes no nearer

  see the moon is too brightly lit and Charles’s Wain

  is going hack empty as it came; the dead want

  to be carried, the sick want to be carried, the broken

  pale soldiers looking like Narcissus want to

  be carried; you wander around in such a strangely

  endless way; only when they die do you stop

  in a kale patch no one has tended for several

  centuries, follow the sound of a dried-up

  spring, somewhere in Karelia maybe, and as

  you think of words like chromosomes and chimeras

  and the aborted growth of lychees, fruits of love,

  you peel off some tree bark and eat it

  somewhere I am suddenly born

  in an expressionless house; when you

  cry out the walls give way and

  the garden, in which you vanish, is

  worn smooth by slugs; you bathe

  jerking like a bird, and when the earth

  is eaten and the rhubarb first

  dries up, summer gives way and

  the town, in which you vanish, is

  slow and black; you walk in

  the streets, do as others do,

  wordlessly in passing nudge

  bits of brick into place; when the route

  is tenacious, ingrained eno
ugh, the houses

  give way, and the high plain spreads,

  sullen, almighty, and almost

  invisible; somewhere a wild

  apricot tree stands still for a moment

  and blooms, but just with a very

  thin veil on the outspread branches

  before going on regardless

  fragment of a springtime, the kind

  of evening when the roads lead almost

  off into the blue, but no one

  moves; the dust of the roads recalls

  the dust of the roads where most

  are shot and the silence

  tugs at stones, but nothing happens

  somewhere something no one has

  touched tumbles from a shelf,

  perhaps as my grandmother stands

  as she always has stood in her

  kitchen and cooks up dried apricots;

  I know she is dead, but their scent

  is so strong that the body sensing it

  it becomes fruit itself; and as

  the fruit is hung up in the nearest

  tree, which may be a birch that

  hears catkins, never apricots,

  the shot sounds beforehand, ahead

  of just after, its sound like a

  door with no house standing wide open still

  hydrogen bombs exist

  a plea to die

  as people used to die

  one day in ordinary

  weather, whether you

  know you are dying

  or know nothing, maybe

  a day when as usual you have

  forgotten you must die,

  a breezy day in

  November maybe, as

  you walk into the kitchen

  and barely manage to

  notice how good

  and earthy the potatoes

  smell, and barely

  manage to put the lid on,

  wondering whether you

  salted them before you

  put the lid on,

  and in a flash,

  while puffs of steam

  leak past the lid, barely

  manage to remember your life

  as it was and still

  is, while the potatoes

  boil and life, which you

  always have said must go

  on, really does go

  on, a plea, an

  ordinary plea, an

  ordinary day, that

  life can continue

  completely ordinarily

  without it ever happening

  that any of all

  the cruel experiments