Excerpts from
Under the Dog Star
By Thomas Boberg
Letter from a tourist
I seek
the perfect place in the house
running incessantly around the block
after the white room with the cool wind
Iīve been hunting for my whole life.
I am free to board a barrel
and get smashed up under the bloom of the Southern Cross against
some
plundered guano isle in the ember-beaming ocean.
Bound thus in a dilemma
that merely augments the tension of the sphere
between the basic conditions of the cell
and the blue space of the bird;
and with all we know today silence
naturally comes closest.
If the arrow doesnīt
aim at the farthest point,
and there is no center
but air and earth, essences, water
and moreover people
when someone learns he has a cut above the brow
and a sentence between the bars and infinity
the fall is hardly avoided
down in a spectacular drawing of the shoulders
just as it wasnīt worth it
for the shame would survive us?
and the swans when they float past The French Cafe,
singing...
and the elephant on the way out of the picture, the impala, the giraffe,
the ostrich,
and the word
when it no longer airs our unbelief?
Someplace in Zimbabwe there is a person about to
rouse a sleeping spirit.
A whirl of banshees over the Kalahari of catatonia
dancing dust devils
and the rhinoceros rises in a swami of egrets,
while the air is pierced by bullets
the baobab tree rips itself up by the roots,
for now it wants to leave.
But I am also an alien
and you in your own land fleeing something evil on earth
fugitive
under the sun
that every morning squanders its letters of light
seen from freedomīs high view
and all day through
in under the iron doors
making the tin bowls warp in the heat.
Down here
we begin dreaming
especially when twilight comes creeping
especially we fantasize about winter
especially when it gets later
and we notice it is too late for all the fantasizing
here with the rope around our neck
and the bag over our head
and the earth in a moment
being heaved away beneath our feet.
Translated by Verne Moberg
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