Excerpts from
Praxis, 9: The Music of the Repeated
By Per Højholt
The Person at the Top
I dream of a poem as little to be questioned
as the fact that highway A 15 streches up beyond the hill
with four trailer trucks doggedly creeping up, upwards
until the rosebay up here bows to the pressure of the wind.
I dream of a poem disgracing the yellowhammer
the lizards and the many coloured flies - a poem
as a semi in low gear - and what do I get
when the stillness suddenly hatches out gifts? A wood pigeon´s
enticement from its shelter and the lark´s loud
warbling with cowberry under a cloudless sky!
The Person Will Do
When one is watching one of the new, light passenger trains
sliding, already in speed and with a
grinding, definitive sound as when one cuts glass
one can become seized with wonder that life
as such with its sorrow and camping is long
enough, exactly, e.g. today I had the time both
to see a big toad at the entrance to the supermarket and
to reconcile myself to the probability that I will never see it again.
& Ewald
This is why the stones sweat in June: a minute difference
between the air and the cold ground
wherein they are stuck forces upon them a language of tears
as were they spirits in distress under a cloudless sky, crying condensation
or the foreheads of aging angels
dripping with sweat from the violent exertion
to write themselves up
to warm the fusty wings in the sunbreeze
(Though daily movements here
on the pavement I have year after year
succeeded in keeping down all the angels,
until now, oh! because no one knows better than I
that one fine morning I will open the door
to see all the stones in the driveway take off, large as well as small
to fly home to god, he to whose
heaven roads do not grow on trees).
Translated by Preben Mortensen
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