Alphabet Read online

  that the Teller group

  performed on

  Eniwetok where

  the waves of the

  Pacific raged in fury,

  or any of all

  the experiments that

  the Sakharov group

  performed on

  Novaya Zemlya where

  the waves of the Arctic

  Ocean raged in fury

  without these

  experiments or those

  of the British French

  Chinese ever reaching

  real real-

  isation here where we

  still live in a

  real real

  world as opposed to

  the unreality of

  Novaya Zemlya

  and Eniwetok; here I

  walk down to the still

  blue of the Sound shining

  with evening, toss

  a stone into the water,

  see how the circles

  widen, reaching

  even the farthest shores

  12

  life, the air we inhale exists

  a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all,

  an equation, an open and transferable expression

  in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in

  early summer, a passion, passion in it all,

  as if in the air’s play with elm keys falling

  like manna there existed a simply sketched design,

  simple as happiness having plenty of food

  and unhappiness none, simple as longing

  having plenty of options and suffering none,

  simple as the holy lotus is simple

  because it is edible, a design as simple as laughter

  sketching your face in the air

  in mid-November, a season

  when all human dreams are the same,

  a uniform, blotted out history

  like that of a sun-dried stone

  a couple of mute parents stand there,

  a dog and some children run round,

  an arrival they try to imagine

  as water that’s raised to my mouth

  I lay sleeping inside my hotel room;

  it was like an alien dream

  that the guest before me must have shouldered

  aside in his sleep and forgot

  in the dream there was no one familiar;

  I met only the blank scrutiny

  of an apricot tree in bloom, turning

  around as it left suddenly

  perhaps it was left there one summer

  when the world was as white as a feast,

  before I had learned that a dreamer

  must dream like the trees, be a dreamer

  of fruit to the last

  snow

  is not snow at all

  when it snows

  in mid-June

  snow has

  not fallen from

  the sky at all

  in June

  snow itself

  has risen

  and has bloomed

  in June

  as apple

  apricot

  chestnut trees

  in June

  to be lost

  in real snow

  which is June snow

  in flower and seed

  when you need never die

  don’t panic; it’s bracken on a

  trip, gathering time and

  binding it; bracken has

  its own calendar, tears and rain

  and a little sunlight as black

  as when black slugs carry it

  around; ah, hear the tranquil

  fronds and the undermost brown

  seconds of the spores, ticking

  still; perhaps they remember

  how hidden we lay, how

  hidden in places where

  no people ever go we lay,

  before we were born at last

  and crept out; I look

  back uneasily and the snow,

  falling so thinly here this

  morning, wakens carefully

  and melts; a meadow lies

  spread with lapwings; I walk

  toward the sound; the ice

  crackles icily, just as when

  tears were once to he crushed

  like pearls and strewn

  over the patient; at last

  the body is so salty that

  its long story dissolves

  the mirror; a little lint from a

  quilt my mother must have shaken

  disappears, and childhood

  spreads ahead; over

  by the window a little sunlight

  is folded into place in the curtain

  evening June sixteenth

  from a train stopped too soon

  I see that they’re dumping

  live coals outside

  the closed brickworks

  maybe as usual they’re walking

  down the path and away while

  it gets ready to cloud up

  and rain

  only an edge of the farthest

  fields is still in sun

  so maybe it’s not coals at

  all that I see

  maybe it’s poppies, maybe

  the closed brickworks is

  a forest only partially

  felled, maybe

  it’s sheep walking down

  the path, while the shadows from

  a fence they pass

  toss in gusts

  it’s like looking

  at an old painting whose

  background is always being crossed

  by a row of figures

  not until it’s all magnified

  do you realise that they

  are either people going home from

  a brickworks

  tired soldiers on the march

  or sheep running away

  from a herd; in the foreground

  sits the Madonna

  in a matted thicket

  of green blackberries

  cobalt bombs exist

  wrapped in their cloaks

  of cobalt-60 isotopes

  whose half-life

  ensures the most

  harmful effects

  there’s no more to

  say; we ensure that

  the harm is as great

  as it can be; there’s no

  more to say; we

  ensure ourselves all or

  nothing; there’s no

  more to say; by

  ensuring that all

  can be turned into

  nothing, we

  lose the capacity to

  think of nothing,

  of not a thing

  in the world as we

  say, when we simply

  are being; there’s

  no more to

  say; we

  ensure

  that it’s all erased,

  obliterated,

  so the first

  the crucial

  nothing gets no chance

  to make the poetry

  that wind can make

  in air or water;

  there’s no more

  to say; we kill

  more than we think

  more than we know

  more than we feel;

  there’s no more

  to say; we hate;

  there is no more;

  like a regal bird

  in its coffin of silt

  in mud like a worm,

  like a hawk

  the storm has broken

  like a grey parrot

  dragged onto a steamboat

  from someone’s plantation

  I’ll live from now on

  half-smothered, stuffed down

  no one special among

  all the traffic-worn doves

  in whose last

  clutch of feathers the hopeless

  cloud cover of
peace

  makes the human eye

  plummet; that’s how I’ll live;

  with my own little fine

  half-life deep in

  my heart; that’s how I’ll die,

  I have said to myself

  I will die, said it with

  thanks for sorrow,

  oblivion, done; said

  to myself: think like

  a bird building nests,

  think like a cloud, like

  the roots of the dwarf birch

  think; like a leaf on a tree

  thinks; like shadow and light,

  like shining bark thinks,

  like the grubs beneath

  the barkskin think, like lichen

  on a stone and a bit of dry rot

  think, like the squawroot thinks,

  like this misty forest clearing

  thinks, like the marshes think

  where the rising of the rainbow

  is reflected, think like a bit of

  mud, a bit of raindrop

  thinks, think like a mirror

  so vitally — see

  on its throne of nothing

  the sandstorm’s vortex;

  see how banally enclosed

  in the least small grain of

  sand an ingenious

  fossilised life rests up

  from the trip; just see

  how calmly it bears

  the primal sea’s swarm

  of beginnings; just see

  how simple a sign

  in which like a substance

  the truth is reflected;

  just see how

  truly, graciously; let

  things be; add

  words, but let

  things be; see

  how easily they find

  shelter by themselves

  behind a stone; see

  how easily they steal

  into your ear

  and whisper

  to death to go away

  13

  metal, the ore in the mountain, exists,

  darkness in mine shafts, milk not let down

  from mothers’ breasts, an ingrown dread where

  whisperings exist, whisperings exist

  the cells’ oldest, fondest collusion

  consider this market, consider this import

  and export of fathers, half bullies

  half tortured soldiers, consider

  their barren last vanishing, metal

  to metal, as the amount of unsown maize

  grows and the water shortage grows

  speak now of mildness, now of the mystery

  of salt; speak now of mediation, of mankind, of

  courage; tell me that the marble of banks

  can be eaten; tell me that the moon is lovely,

  that the extinct moa eats green melon,

  that merriment exists, is thriving,

  that moss animals and mackerel shoals exist, that

  means of giving up, of descent, exist, and

  physical portioning out, as in poems, of matchless

  earthly goods, that pity exists

  layered light, as if behind

  layers in a fresco the snow

  on the mountains, its shapes

  so like bromine dissolved

  hidden as always on sleeptrips

  a bit of sun breaks through as

  if from the earthside, eggs

  crack and quick as an eddy

  of chaffinches over the hedge

  the flight of thoughts from my

  body; their aliveness, beaks,

  wings, and the closeness

  of the others’ welcome as soon

  as we alight on a birch and the

  reason for our lives is revealed:

  when the birches came to Lakselv

  and founded the town they brought

  along tufts of grass for a few sheep

  so others than the leaves

  could listen to the rustling

  of the leaves and see how they

  transform sunlight almost

  as if to clear green water;

  since then the sheep have sometimes

  taken the birches along to the beach

  a riddle for the reindeer at the

  shoreline grazing

  among half-furred stones, the last

  bit of morning mist wrapped around

  their greyish bodies, otherwise just

  windless ice-turquoise sky

  and the flower of an eider duck

  on frost-stricken water

  morning June twentieth

  as if the hydrogen

  at the stars’ cores

  turned white here on earth

  your brain can

  feel white

  as if someone had

  pleated up time

  pushed it in

  through the door of

  a room

  where a table

  two chairs and the unused

  bed of the non-sleeper

  crumble

  in advance

  as if haze from

  alien space

  travelled like angels

  you sit

  in your corner

  until without any-

  thing definite happening

  you suddenly

  get up

  and go

  like a bird that

  invisibly wakens

  and feeds its

  unborn young

  at midnight

  when no one can

  know whether things

  as they are

  go on

  it’s new for me

  to be hearing cicadas

  here where it’s cold

  and so there are none

  perhaps it’s the kind

  of thing that’s always happened

  when the light travels north

  and the birches go along

  like when a room from

  a dream on a trip

  is the same room that you

  come home and move into

  there’s a drawing of

  an encapsuled child

  crouched inside a crystal

  that’s not especially big

  as if in dreams

  dreamed not by people

  animals or birds

  but by insects perhaps

  perhaps by the traveller

  himself who is looking

  away from himself for a while

  and is spread in the birches’ haze

  perhaps by a child who earnestly

  examines a lake in the forest

  and finds that the soul might well

  have been dreamed by cicadas

  it happens sometimes

  when the snow melts

  that all it has hidden

  comes out so the soul can be seen

  as when death doesn’t really

  become visible until

  somebody looks at the gift

  that the dead person took to the grave

  I think it must look like

  the tarnished metal box

  I’ve known for a long time

  I’m carrying with me

  it doesn’t contain

  any more than a coin

  a tooth, a silver thimble

  and a little empty bottle

  but its scent when

  it’s opened

  fills everything

  like midnight sun

  that’s how I’ve imagined

  being able to imagine:

  a space of clear crystal

  around the deathbed

  where the dead person first

  really looks like himself

  by dying away from the others

  following the sleepwalkers’ trail now

  on beneath the high plain’s

  broad balsam skies

  across an icelocked lake

  along a windgrown isle />
  straight down through the fire

  straight out through the snow

  wrapped in the cloak of the wind

  baked in the bread of the sun

  thwarted long-lasting precise

  breathed into the stone-mountain’s ice

  over the grassblades’ spires

  under the root system’s sores

  out through the permafrost membrane

  in through the iceplant’s hairs

  rechristened in mountain coal

  cupped in the high tarn’s eye

  around a sunburst’s arms

  between a light-chasm’s thighs

  borne in the mountain king’s jewel chest

  exalted, select, and fine

  preserved in the cradle of air

  gone on the rainbow’s paths

  in through the shore lark’s egg

  out through the sunlight’s wall

  they silently travel

  the Milky Way’s dust

  they set up their tents

  in the leaves of the stars

  the chicory blooms

  so endlessly blue

  as if no one were

  anything except small

  I sit myself down

  with my wide-awake doll

  whose eyes made of glass

  are so strange and so fair

  my mother comes out

  with a steaming bowl

  some meat she has warmed

  at the North Star’s fire

  I talk with the doll

  whose face looks like mine

  about the good luck

  that we cannot lose

  so that we suddenly

  are born, come to be

  so that we all at once

  meet others, increase

  we borrow some fire

  that’s beginning to catch

  as if we ourselves

  had been rendered from death

  as if even stars

  at a touch could grow soft

  defoliants exist

  dioxin for instance

  denuding trees and

  shrubs and destroying

  people and animals

  by spraying

  fields and forests

  we achieve fall and death

  in the middle of the most

  luxuriant summer;

  this shifting of sorrow

  this light-filled morning

  was otherwise happily fair

  but the grass is all gone

  and a canopy’s spun

  not of threads but of poisonous air

  over forest and shore

  over mouse over man

  now the sky is a cavern

  where withered birds

  will rot like fallen fruit

  where tractionless clouds

  will atomise cities

  and eddy them slyly in flight

  like water through water

  like sand through sand

  even slugs with their slime-trails

  are porous as mirrors

  whose human reflections are lost

  just the stalk of a nettle