by Douglas Robinson
The trees are, the nights grow longer bit by bit,
so slowly nobody notices.
Nor can the darkness still the whispering in the trees.
Still, it is as sad as a child
to whom one speaks soothingly, from whom one is keeping something,
but who already knows.
(Paavo Haavikko)
I light candles astride the winter mums.
I see you counting the months on your fingers,
fingers high.
I know what you're counting.
You'd tell me soon enough.
The fingers that make you a door at such
an abstract task.
A short year, so short that next year this time
you'll have a three-month-old baby,
or as a man's life, a year, a second snow
has fallen before he's left his footprints in it.
Death comes quickly for a man. A woman dies
slowly, has children,
and her happiness is to die before them.
When she grieves for her child her voice and flesh are one.
(Paavo Haavikko)
If you owe goose eggs, don't borrow
to buy duck eggs.
When interest's at 10 it'll suck gold out of the moon.
When others buy, sell. Buy when others sell.
Think slowly, then act swiftly.
Extricate yourself promptly from a bad situation.
Put it out of your mind.
In a hundred years this will be a hundred years ago.
Don't be afraid of banality.
(Paavo Haavikko)
Imperious goldeneye, waterfowl
in general,
eagles, storks, cranes make impossible
demands,
provide an urgent livelihood
for so many,
such well-meaning bureaucrats,
predators,
the bat asks only that your house be old,
just run down enough,
the bat asks only that
you,
your soul be just run down enough
to live in, under the roof, that
you not have the money to fix it up,
but need not
sell
what that leathery bird asks of you is
that you endure.
(Paavo Haavikko)
And she moves in a room where there is nothing but the expectant water,
moves as if the room were full of mirrors,
so that it's no use trying anything, you've got to
face every direction.
A peace comes over her as if there were no mirrors
or as if they were blind, like a masseur.
She wanted to see herself without looking, and it might be
possible, if the mirrors were one.
And the air has breathed in her skin's scent
unwitting, like one asleep.
(Paavo Haavikko)
And so she nearly stops breathing
like a wind that has to catch its breath
all the more fiercely.
And so for a moment she grows smaller like some piece of clothing,
something she might now be wearing.
All in this world into which there is only one way to come,
so many ways out,
that it makes us different.
Such a public place, this world, that you never know
whether this is what they call a room, and whether this room
isn't growing gustily smaller.
(Paavo Haavikko)
They call you an aristocrat
because you have to be somebody,
and a palace,
because you have to live somewhere,
and to sleep, one night at a time.
(Paavo Haavikko)
Indision
1
Now Ehrensvärd starts building a great fortress on the Wolf Islands, every year a barrel of gold is shipped all the way from France for it, also a lilac bush, which he didn't order. It takes root tenaciously in the barren soil, ten years from now you'll have to hack it out with a shovel. It spread fast from the islands, at first, then made shorter journeys in a basket. It comes in two shades, light and dark. It's never been written about before, but it will be something to watch it spread. It must have been in bloom. Indision. Look, see, now it's gone.
2
A great many birds hanging dense from the sky like a chandelier being installed in an endless skyey room now that it's gone five o'clock, here, not far from here, or maybe it was meant differently, shaped like a long thin necklace made of black birds, long and straight and pendant like tremendous hands, the woman's who had just stormed over the placement of the chandelier, and it was taken away, her hands, and these must be her eyes, these her hands, and they held the necklace as it lengthened and filled with birds, lifting it up till it touched her skin which must have been warm. This is indision. It must have been late March for the ice was thin in places and had started to boom and crack, and the crystal in the lamps that were hung from the beams in the centermost house in the fortress, for the time it took to fire twenty-one rounds on the old cannon. Indision. But a great many birds per cubic kilometer flew across the channel.
3
Everybody's gone now, no poor even from that time, tenaciously as they take root, the wind no longer blows there for time is past, and the poor woman whose clothes are worn and wrinkled like skin, and her lips are quite visible but tightly shaped and she is thin and yet teardrop-shaped like one who is with child. She passes the lilac. The wind no longer presses the poor thin cloth against the richness of her thighs. Not even hers whose face surrounds a birthmark, a proud one, like a coat of arms, or like the side of an apple that has only a face, and like an apple seen from the side her face is large and very much visible. Lilac. Best transplanted by the roots. They were brought here from Versailles, one solitary plant, like Adam. Women of that period are all two hundred fifty years old, or else dead.
4
And like skin that you don't really need and like darkness that you don't really need and like a strong wind, even a storm doesn't make up for lovers' lost darkness, and like love that stays green too long like a lilac bush, and like light that you don't really need, just candles, melting flaking ice, and like a door that's opened so many times, and a room, so too it's enough for this tale that you be a book again, one you put down on a stone bench, one you put aside and stop reading. The stone might have been a sundial.
5
No court martial could ever determine once and for all why you have four arms and why they should have started from you, and whether you aren't some kind of monster, but no, no indision in the world will make me think differently, four. You had butterflies in your brassiere, rose blossoms. As surely as eyes that, once shut, must open, you did. One closed his eyes, one lifted finger to lips, one covered your mouth with his hand, one unbuttoned you, one kept the cloth from falling, one spread all his fingers. And in this room you became a door.
6
As death dances the senses, bureaucratic word as if we'd been made of substances, positions, and could be rebuilt like the same house out of paper, as if this were all a play, things that never were and were only copied, so mute that you hear music playing, and as the bathwater when you step out of it climbs up to where you were, though it has no hands and though it's so mute, weren't there three of you, three women who were forever walking up and down here, and suddenly the world has turned so that you who were just leaning up against the wall see a door opening where I see a floor, and two walls are still walls, but the floor and ceiling are walls too, and one wall is the ceiling, it has windows facing upward, the door opens downward, odd little hatch. But the candles, and the crystal around them, are still there. I refuse to speculate how. Butterflies in your brassiere, rose blossoms, and you have four arms. And as and as and as.
7
Now the wind waves its hands through the trees and against the wall, it's the enormous picture of your breathing, the shadow on the wall will breathe your portrait, enormous where the candle is close, your portrait which is huge on the wall, and the wind turns to beat down on the ground, it makes the same waving gestures in the air and against the ground, no, it can't get inside, it has noplace to go but this autumn.
8
In the room she suddenly takes off her sweater which is a pale woolen knit. It's that cold outside. She's pulled her bra tight, it'll warm her like a long walk. The lilac wants to spread, the pattern to be repeated.
9
And just as a woman who has some blemish is small and she has a name, her name, so I'm a man. What I like about things is their slowness, the way water boils over, the difference between birches when they sway up and down like you, and pines.
10
He flees the rain in under roofs, her rage out into the rain. Roofs do the drumming. He walks through the rooms one at a time. He doesn't get sad right away. That takes time.
11
The years are the beating of your heart, hard and fast as just after you've murdered someone, and there he is, no further away when you met him, arm's reach from you, if he turned suddenly you'd see him, embrace him, part forever. Like a good book that you put aside with that gesture of impatience or boredom, so life stops when the world plunges headlong through the tail of a dragon.
(Paavo Haavikko)
It's no use
talking with the wind
arguing with the waters
asking the trees, answering the grass.
(Paavo Haavikko)
You are a long sentence.
No one could say of you that you lack roundness in the knees.
Have I ever said that mattered to me?
No one could say it's like sitting in bed and clutching
a grasshopper, not knowing where to put it.
There are those of whom it can be said that their feet
don't quite fill their socks.
You become restless, and quite motionless.
You don't adjust your hair
though your hands want to.
You hear something. I see it.
(Paavo Haavikko)
She burns the lamp mornings longer than she needs to, she's alone
in the room, doesn't want the dark to dissipate too soon,
but it doesn't make the morning's pale moon any more colorful
when the paper the children are flying sticks in the grass.
(Paavo Haavikko)
The tree, I wonder at the tree,
the living shoots that strike deep into the tree,
dry block: to survive,
the tree (shoot-shaken) took charge of the sprouting,
shoots those country-bred women
who found jobs in the branches
roots lead down to the land
owners,
women finely virtued like cheeses fresh from the oven,
men: it wasn't easy,
the slow dulling, the tree its noble fruit, their wine its fermenting,
no: not dry fruit, not the sagging limb, no,
the wild cutting: dead but dashing,
at seventeen the Song was sung and spawned three sons,
drowned at washing, since
which the willow has meant weeping: can you explain
how black turned gray, and where the houses go, when they wither
away
(Paavo Haavikko)
Fruit for the trees, juice for the fruit of the trees, and I said,
bloom.
Said the fruit, fiercely: we bloom, our soul, we bloom,
our blooming is all.
But it isn't,
the soul sings its lullaby when it wakes, yes,
but a pear is just a fruit,
heavy, true, voluptuous, yes, but nothing en soi,
no fear that fruit will wake, inanimate things,
their redness is all,
it's true,
the soul is all we animate, that's the blooming,
the dawning is all we see, and this about fruit:
fruit is gone,
dropped heavy to the ground full of thought: life is joy,
fruit is gone, life is joy,
inside the pear live five tiny dwarves, still it's nothing,
just a fruit that dropped to the ground, ground is sound: life is joy.
(Paavo Haavikko)
The hand that writes us writes
four plays a year.
But summer sees the most flowers drop, and fall
is a rich old man who can't see the end of his wealth,
the empty rooms, cold.
Spring breeds screeching birds
and draws its blinds, but can't stop them
piercing our hearts.
Screeching birds, black-throated mallard.
Love that's easy is a dream.
Winter, this to be staged in the dark,
it changes the voices,
its light in candles on either side of the mums
is for you. We walk with eyes open, unseeing,
fingers spread.
(Paavo Haavikko)
So wide in the middle narrowing a little your long smooth
back, from which your face vanishes suddenly,
like a sheet of brass that resounds but makes
no sound.
(Paavo Haavikko)
The dark waits. The stranger waits.
On an undimensioned sea, a world to reckon with,
I am shipwrecked against worlds.
The black chariots come. The fields push flowers into the fog.
The gods plunge into me. Silences sleep in me.
(Paavo Haavikko)
Don't remember,
the dead
remember the dead,
the fall flowers,
snow-fallen,
spring flowers.
(Paavo Haavikko)