Excerpts from
Praxis, 11: Lightning Flash Shots
By Per Højholt
1
The calm that gasps for breath in the hurricanes eye
draws us still like all black holes
in the universe, drags us in, orgiastic
for we take rest in exceptions supreme
phenomena that know of us though we
are not their forebears: They decode our dreams like air
and baying metaphor while we start more
and more of those near noiseless machines
on whose screens they successively arrive
Sorrow. An outline
Sorrow such as drives you so far on jetties
that lungs and sundry entrails axe inflated well
gives no help: The heart turns in herring tears
and dearth of whales thuders white against the wharf
Only such commodious beasts have drawer space enough
for your feelings but like low-pitched belshing they roll far out
with drawers slammed shut and great fresh brains!
& Hölderlin
So impaled on the point of a needle were none
of those you knew alive when you sought them with your eyes
so for the delight of what other ear far from your own
did you force formulated cries from the torment?
Now leaves are bursting and spring rampaging again, yellow
with buttercups, purple with thistle nodes. Deaf I ask
anew: Did you sing for them alone and the breeze caressing
windflowers at that place, or was it your breath I saw
your song I overheard?
is a spade
When he stepped down on to the platform
he filled it with butterflies
so I held my metaphors
on a tight rein: on the way out into nature
I had the car full
of his unspeaking visionaries
and so I asked my own to stay
in the garage and not represent anything.
While we had our tea with words
his were fluttering about resembling
and resembling but when we went over
to the garage again we saw that
engine oil and rake and sack truck and
broom had also burst into flower, only not
the spade, the spade survived.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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