Swedish Poetry 1
(Parousía) Our time, why shouldn’t I go backward
into the moment with my trembling preferences, my restless desire, my thought’s uttermost solitude? When I blink I usually see my mother, sitting on the sofa with a book, the gaze from her eyes full of shimmering darkness. Am I filling you up? Maybe you could slap me or kiss me or stick a finger in one of my orifices or in some other way connect yourself to my body. I feel rather like the hand of John of Damascus, cut off by his master the Caliph, restored by the Virgin Mary. Am I not just so? The third hand. Take it. A church Father, maybe the last. Our time. At times I wake up far from myself, helplessly calling out my mother’s name with my mouth full of sand. Compared to our bodies’ incomprehensible density the image, John writes, is a dark glass. His metaphor makes us all transparent. Holiness illuminates the body, makes it shimmer. A dense lantern. We should approach images as we do living bodies, in veneration. They move behind the dark glass. Chew their sand hesitantly. The image of Paul came to life, writes John, when his namesake, Father Chrysostom, inwardly read Paul’s letter. Our time protects no one from death. Inwardly we shall look at pictures of one another. Open, eager faces. Searching. Hopeful. Despairing. And our time’s severed hand that absentmindedly always strokes other cheeks Reddening the non-existent. The imaginary. Shimmering Magnus William-Olsson, from Ögonblicket är för Pindaros ett litet rum i tiden (The Moment for Pindar is a Small Space in Time), 2006 Translated by Rika Lesser Note: Parousía: Gk. "presence" 57 SWEDISH POETRY