Excerpts from
Life in the Tropics
By Niels Frank
They
torment me, the silk shirts that hang over the yellow
chair in his room.
Each shirt part of a false openness:
Unbuttoned and still only the vertical ribs of the chair are
visible.
As he brings in the food in small pots, I fall into the world
of shirts.
No matter how hard I take off and want out, the cloth swells
over me, strikes me to the point of humiliation.
Then think of something else, whether people should live
alone, possible corrections of the Communist Manifesto,
whether curry might be a blended spice.
Think about man´s lot and if anyone at all remembers what it
consists of
To be left with shirts, and pots, and full ashtrays and to read
them carefully as if they were horoscopes, the position of
heavenly bodies at a given moment.
Think of what they foresee: Deaths in the family, a happy
night out with good friends,
infidelity, unexpected fortune.
But nothing is thinkable, or everything is unthinkable.
Instead a silence haunts me, so I must call out to it, but it
only speaks its own language, or it speaks no language
Correction: It does not haunt me, I haunt it.
We are actually close friends, he and I, or I am not his
friend but he is mine:
We tell each other nothing and about possible corrections of
nothing and it makes us laugh half the night, but the next
morning is so distracted, so tear dimmed.
Correction: The morning is not tear dimmed, we are not
close
friends.
But then, on the way to distraction, he rises from the table
and poses as a model for my wildest dreams.
How staring his nipples are, melancholy!
Correction: It is not my wildest dreams, the nipples are not
staring.
Nipples: Position of heavenly bodies at a given moment. Horoscope: ie.,
"time's watcher”.
Think about whether time stands still and watches itself,
whether it is man's lot to be the victim of what it sees.
The predictions shift violently within me, but I am not a part
of their affectation.
And they are not a part of mine.
But the shirts continue to humiliate the eyes.
Then pots, and plates, and table mats disappear, and I realize
the table is green, that I have been examines in self-control.
Not passed!
Six false steps put back into practice.
Translated by Mark Wekander and the author
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