the face never changes,
that it is always your face
filling the x-ray of the aging canvas.
The girl asleep at the table
dreams you awake, and you awaken,
convinced, the dream was yours.
PER WASTBERG
#11 *
Someone's stacking the leaves of an artichoke in heaps,
cradles of blue-green and gold. Someone's recounting
the Parsifal legend for his restless child.
My daugher, with buttercups in her hair, skips
over sun-bright roots .
But somewhere else, in tiled rooms, while the cries
of anguished children scream from a tape, a policeman
puts out his cigarette in their mother's navel.
Our life - the only one we have - has so many sides. The dead
can converse only through survivors.
Who can interpret our census statistics?
Mallows at the feet of the Virgin in a medieval tapestry
signify something more than beauty in full flower.
And the moon over the soldier is more than a half-closed
eye. Meanings, soon forgotten; and yet the crack
in a kneecap remains visible centuries after
the clods of earth have fallen away.
·Editor's Note: This poem is from "Narmare underrattelser" ("Further Particulars")
in
En avliigsen likhet (A Remote Resemblance)
by Per Wastberg
<Cl
1983 (Stockholm:
Wahlstrom
&
Widstrand) . Translation copyright
<Cl
by Rika Lesser, 1985 .
