Excerpts from
The Water Carriers
By Thomas Boberg
They Sing of Fleas
Where is it then, the place where I can merge
together with my steps and my steps with my
shadow, the shadow with the echo
where I become the one I saw in the light of an
other
After all it is simply a trial
a whipping from spot to spot, from second to
second
where the permanent values are everything that is
not us
Might it be there, the place, on the top of the
golden spire
there, in the sonorous strokes of the bells
and coming to the sombre passage end, there where an
unexpected summer starts
the bottom of an alley in the deepest degradation
that always called to one of us
the cross of the heart´s blind glow when it stuck
its point in through the trellis of sterility?
For this is simply demolition
a withering without rest
a chatter and fear of the gaping ravine that
will in the end split the mountains of paper like flakes
of snow under the hammering piston of the ultimate
I cast my mind towards the fixed place, that
harshly threw the bright beams off
that in which life was not
and yet whose movements ended in a near
eternity
so distant from our fall
I have become strangely primitive, a monstrous
and unruly fluteplayer
looking for the luminous bone
on the edge of the assembly´s murmuring
too embarrassed to dress myself up
and too conceited not to toss out words
I would have liked to cruise across
Throw myself overboard
And see the seagulls´ dazzling flight
Shaping my flighty thoughts
And coasts are laced with vessels
grotesque caravans of words
and rubbish, fugitives´ goods travelling
over ramshackle bridges
and loneliness that knows itself in shaking
blown glass bells
an earthly fools´ dance jingling in the distant
tinkle of bells
or else who was the cloud that went sailing past
into another´s life
a deceptive dot that moved away
a flea that first bit and then jumped?
Translated by Patricia Crampton
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