From 'After Nature'
by WG Sebald

When morning sets in,
the coolness of the night
moves out into the plumage
of fishes, when once more
the air’s circumference
grows visible, then at times
I trust the quiet, resolve
to make a new start, an excursion
perhaps to a region of
camouflaged ornithologists.
Come, my daughter, come on, give
me your hand, we’re leaving
the town, I’ll show you the mill
twice each day set in motion by current,
a groaning miraculous construct
of wheels and belts
that carries water’s power
right into stone,
right into trickling dust
and into the bodies of spiders.
The miller is friendly,
has clean white paws,
tells us all kinds of lore
to do with the story of flour.
A century ago here Edward Fitzgerald,
the translator of Omar Khayyam,
vanished. At an advanced age
one day he boarded his boat,
sailed off with his top hat
tied on, into the North Sea
and was never seen again.
A great enigma, my child, look,
here are eleven barrows
for the dead and in the sixth
the impress of a ship long gone
with forty oars, the grave of
Raedwald of Sutton Hoo.
Merovingian coins, Swedish
weaponry, Byzantine silver
the king took on his voyage
and his warriors even now
on this sandy strip keep their weapons
hidden in grassy bunkers
behind earthworks, barbed wire
and pine plantations, one great
arsenal as far as your eye can see,
and nothing else but this sky,
the gorse scrub now and then,
a capacious old people’s home,
a prison or mental hospital,
an institution for juvenile delinquents.
In orange jackets you see
the inmates labour
lined up across the moor.
Behind that the end of the world,
the five cold houses of the place called Shingle Street.
Inconsolable a woman
stands at the window, a children’s swing
rusts in the wind, a lonely
spy sits in his dormobile
in the dunes, his radio’s earphones
clipped on. No, here we can
write no postcards, can’t even get out
of the car. Tell me, child,
is your heart heavy as
mine is, year after year
a pebble bank raised
by the waves of the sea
all the way to the North,
every stone a dead soul
and this sky so grey.
So unremittingly grey
and low
as no sky I have seen
anywhere else.
Along the horizon
freighters cross over
into another age
measured by the ticking
of geigers in the power station
at Sizewell, where slowly
they destroy the nucleus
of the metal. Whispering
madness on the heathland
of Suffolk. Is this
the promis’d end? Oh,
you are men of stones.
What’s dead remains
dead. From loving
comes life. I don’t know
who’s telling me what, how,
where or when? Is love
nothing, then, now, or all?
Water? Fire? Good?
Evil? Life? Death?

The difference between narcissus

and sunflower

is a point of view: the first

stares at his image in water

and says, there is no I but I

and the second looks

at the sun and says I am

what I worship.

And at night, difference shrinks

and interpretation widens.

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don’t leave now that you’re here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

EDITH SÖDERGRAN (TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY AVERILL CURDY)
A Life

That the stars are adamant
everyone understands—
but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave
or peace below every gray stone.
If happiness never comes, what is a life?
A lily withers in the sand
and if its nature has failed? The tide
                                         washes the beach at night.
What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web?
What does a dayfly make of its hours?
(Two wings creased over a hollow body.)

Black will never turn to white—
yet the perfume of our struggle lingers
as each morning fresh flowers
spring up from hell.

The day will come
when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse
and all goes still—
when nothing remains but the dayfly
                                         folded in a leaf.
But no one knows it.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand. 

                       To all the victims of the collapse  
                        of the Jet Set, in memoriam

A smell of recently scattered benzene,
of the defeat of the landscape in the middle of a clear night,
of the condemnation of life, its silhouettes, its sorrows.
Words fail to find support in words,
and silence becomes a treacherous sonata in a dance of laments.
A pain silently cuts, like lightning, I sense it,
the arc in which the vowels placed their accents.
And prayer is drowned, and breath forbids itself that sigh,
that of the quiet goodbye, that of the cry unburied amid the rubble.
It was the reaper, fierce plane in hand, arriving dizzily, without a trace of remorse,
to level the party, to slash smiles, desires.
Stupor, diffuse rage, resentful humiliation of the most devious fate.
There is no needle, no knife, rusty dagger, stingray’s edge that could deepen the wounds where it hurts most.
The 7th passes as always, wrapped in mystery.
The 8th arrives, bloodied, made of fear, drunk with terror,
in the cruel month of April, that of the weak lilacs on the wounded earth.
Flowing with rage. Overflowing with stupor.
In familiar sadness, the hours grew slower,
the early morning dew more humid,
the sea’s crooning more solemn and bitter,
to find in their faces the reckless siege,
incomprehensible and sullen,
the indecipherable call of requiem and death.

Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled
Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one
Donkey bolts uphill
               for a little cloud
St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up
That even noses can’t diagnose:
Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem
Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving
Us in the open air of capricorns
               exposed
Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind
For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no
               chandeliers
Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond
Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half-
               shadow needs
You to console even the graves
Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth
Lost even to bloodhounds
With its weeds onions and creeks
Must be restored to its idiom

So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green
Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth
               generation
Inside the orange groves gold words
Sharing the scalpel’s chisel
Tents as yet unpitched
                           others midair
Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons
Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves
Twin scythes for theater or temple
Fresh valley springs and other curly streams
Of thus and so. If ever wisdom
Planned circles of clover and dog grass
Another world might live just as before
               your fingerprint

Letters will exist. People will read and grab
History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky
               remain
Unbridled as children want it
With roosters and pinecones and blue kites
               flags
On Saint Heracleitos’s day
                                       child’s is the kingdom.

I’m almost like that dark hallway
with a few framed photos
and lamps on the walls.
So many visitors
have walked through me,
dark and light,
depending on the illumination.

The bright
stones pass through the air, the bright-
white, the light-
bringers

They don’t
want to come down, nor fall,
nor hit. They open
up
like humble
dog roses, that’s how they open,
they float
toward you, my quiet one,
you, my true one—:

I see you, you gather them with my
new, my
everyman’s hands, you put them
into the Bright-Again no one
has to weep for or name.

In the beginning
The spirit moving
Upon the face of the waters
And in the breaking waves
Tasted salt

And I see fields of it
Drying on the shore.
We let in shallow lakes of sea
To evaporate,
And the salt

Accumulates along their edge
Thanks to the sunlight:
Crystal white,
Enough for everyone,
Harvested and sold

In every shop and on the roads:
Salt!—
In proper measure
Bringing out the taste,
The flavor and spirit

Of our food, hot or cold.
Why should pepper get
So much admiration
When salt does all the work?

So that I can speak of myself and to this time, and even further—so that I can converse with days gone by, I find nothing more fitting than the parable of migration. Maybe because migration is another name for exile made gentler by the alphabet. Maybe because migration is another name for passage. Maybe because it is another articulation to inaugurate a place and adopt it. Maybe because it is another embodiment of loss.

As if migration is another matter. Isn’t the word hejira the past tense of the name given to Ishmael’s mother in whom the descent of Abraham meets the seed of the Arabs? And you in flight are a leap, the seal whose name is the time of ignorance.

Greased by fumes called fatigue.

fatigue—a rose opening,
fatigue—a river flowing,
fatigue—a wing tempted by the horizon’s infinities,

the fatigue of a woman giving her firstborn into the hands of the world. And what surrounds you permeates your limbs, a liquid bitter and delightful. You feel as if you yourself are flowing within this substance and you ask yourself: How can I trickle down, what will be left of me?

In migration you see the world as an endless agglomeration, its teeth sharply honed. But you penetrate without your body being affected, even though it is soft and tender, your skin almost like silk, as the woman that loves you claims. This is how you can see history’s head chopped off, displayed before you in a cauldron or dangling from two hands you do not see. And you can see it floating over the water of a river whose mouth you do not know, whose sources you are unaware of. And it seems to you that you are following the banks of the river with footsteps that distinguish nothing but the distance separating them from the clamor.

In migration it pleases you to say: I want to take the form of a feather and make my second ink of water. You whisper to yourself: With this articulation I hand down another face, with this ink I erase what gives me pleasure to resume in another form.

In migration it becomes easy for you to write the dictionary of things—vegetation, rock, gravel, clouds, windows and the cracks thriving in the walls of being. And you trick yourself out, once in serpent skin, once in onion peel, once in pollen dust.

In migration you forget as if you are remembering and you remember as if you are forgetting. Drowned by that yearning, the comings and goings up and down the ladder of days left in your life on this planet earth—earth that only love can turn into an apple whose scent is imbibed bit by bit.

In migration you become the brother of things and their equal. You sense the spears sinking into your gut are nothing but a different air purifying you as you inhale and exhale. And it is then that you recognize yourself as remnants.

This migration of mine is long in place, enduring even longer within me, as if I do not know myself.

Once in flight I was intent to build a humble abode for the days of my past, not in the village my skin first touched soil—as a friend, the ancient poet put it—but in another place, I prefer not to say where. I sat myself down among them, I mean my days, that are scattered, gathered by force. And instead of staring at them and inquiring and scrutinizing them, they began looking at me and probing and searching and asking. As if they were waiting for something else, another person. Beginning then I started to understand my flight, and those roads no one takes lest they be tempted to track some shadow, some harvest. Roads that always retain ashes as if they were a fire just now dying out, as if the road were a body shattered in the scent of jasmine left over from childhood. There is a tangled binding between me and my flight. I cannot presume that “return” itself would ever fully appreciate the damages. I shall declare my life a home for my flight, and migration a home for my life. I shall tell migration: You are my expanse—you are vast.

The snow comes late this year. Violet shadows
doze like shepherds round
a white fire.
The swaying shadow of a fence looks like a woman’s clavicle—
a woman who dreams of her lover’s snowy journey home,
his late return.

Thin trails lead to the doorway.
A car parked for hours
compresses black earth.
Radio signals float just out of earshot.
A boat with its eel fishers
in luminous raincoats skims by.
A child—his little hand trembling—
casts slanting trees across the table.

The choir kneels.
The moment has come to speak
in a voice I have never known before.

I raise my head and see a single star in the night sky,
shapeless and fearful like the shard of a broken bottleneck,
a star I have for years foolishly followed.
Perhaps the shadow of our infinite persistence
looks to someone else like a large hump
on the Moon
a camel bent over a puddle
preparing for a new stretch of thirst.

I live at the foot of Taipei
never had a Taipei air conditioner
I hear Taipei’s lips have bloomed
with the stink of cars

Taipei’s nectar turns into cold cutlery
turns into rows of steak houses
I went to eat the fumes of bath milk
the sounds of the upstairs neighbor’s toilet flushing

I rode my bicycle to pilfer Taipei’s sunshine
netted some Taipei fish
I found the lions and tigers of Taipei
living in my empty stomach

my face living in Taipei grew hungry
thirty zebra crossings
thirty buses worth of hunger

Taipei inserted into the ears
inserted into the airway inserted into the heart’s ruckus
inserted into swimsuit chlorine
slipped into your eyes nose mouth

Taipei under construction
ten thousand real estate flyers
sweep the sidewalks in the rain

Stay stupid so the world pities you & leaves you alone. Listen to the music bubbling in the boiling broth. Preserve that papaya peel on which the cat left its claw marks before it died. Observe how a laughing man opens his body to the world like a hibiscus. Apologize to the ice cube as it loses its shape in your palm. Notice the delicate basket of light on the mango leaf. Smell the fragrant, floral notes of lemon zest when you feel exhausted to your bones. Pulp words like guarantee, planning, stability, turn them into a ring & hula hoop it on your waist. Trap a breath within your chest when you feel sad. Know a person beyond the shape of their limbs. Follow behind your dog. See the starkness of stamens against lily petals to learn patriarchal hierarchies. Feel hunger when you see a woman planting rice submerged in ankle-deep water. Think of incomplete kisses when a widow wipes the trickle of sweat before it reaches her lips. Learn that a kiss is the fourth basic necessity. Seek that kiss like a deer seeks a flash of light. Linger on its sparkling eyes, its leaping body, its restless feet. Does it ever matter if a bullet is shot, and its body becomes a vessel of blood? Look, instead, into its eyes as astonishment outweighs death. Watch, scan, stare, gaze in a way that it changes the world. When this doesn’t seem enough and you think of yourself as a fool, understand that this is the nature of capitalism. Hide and take refuge within yourself. The sole purpose of your life is to become a possibility.

A red cloud stands alone.
Is it lost, and at a loss for where to go?
Is it spent; pausing to catch its breath?
And what of its color?
Is it bleeding?
Or has it paused to dress
A celestial gash?

Minutes later, it retreats—
No sign of injury in the sky.
Maybe they left together?

A red cloud carrying a wound—
But to where?

Here the days don’t dissolve in air 
they fall into the water 
shaping their own shell 
a sheen of separation. 
A hawk flies over summer’s body 
diving again, again 
feeding and drunk from the fall. 
There’s nothing here 
but manic wind alone and stones 
and sea 
a senseless promise 
sharpens our lust with the moon’s blade.

When I arrived here, in the landscape of endings, 
the wind entered my mouth with so much rage 
as if I were its only vessel 
until all my words vanished.

Each tree receives the wind’s gust differently 
some suffer, others—again—resist 
(I’ve met a palm tree that birthed the wind,
then sent it in every direction) 
others shiver all over and change colors. 
I, of course, am not a tree 
I sat down and wore the wind’s coat 
I stooped my head and looked at the ground 
through its cracks, thyme’s roots 
             & their hieroglyphics 
struggled to enter the light. 
Then the words came back.

In the ongoing fruitless search for a third-person-singular and gender-neutral term that remains both familiar and human in English, as “hắn” does in Vietnamese, the author and translator have settled on “that one.”

I don’t want to construct an obvious figure, actually, I can’t stand the model who fuels inspiration into this short story, I can’t stand that one the way someone with a chronic sinus infection can’t stand abnormal shifts in weather, I can’t stand that one to the point that every time I happen to be sitting among that one in a crowd, I start to feel short of breath, or whenever I feel short of breath, I immediately know that one’s scent must be in the air, though when am I ever not short of breath, I don’t want to even give the damn name there a form a hair color of sun-charred rust, a complexion of leaden motor oil, owl eyes or a hawk beak nose, with teeth just begging to tear apart the sky, I would rather no one remember anything about that one, I would rather that one have nothing “memorable,” and forget about the reader’s asking me for that one’s biography, matter of fact for that one’s mood to be more “truly human” of course, such luxury, no I will not stoop to placing a name on this figure, I would even toss those third-person-singular words that I feel are still too overly neutral and objective, like “one,” “guy,” “it,” “he,” “she” unless there was some one-syllable word more deserving, more potently biting to use as a replacement, I couldn’t call that one “zero,” you know very well it’s got two syllables there, and such plump, beautiful ones too, and I couldn’t call that one “shit” or “pig” or “trash” because unfortunately I’m someone inherently fair to all substances and categories of existence, like I said already, I’m not strong enough to kill that one with a gun, anyway how would I even get a gun, I can’t strangle that one, can’t strike that one down, cannot, I’ve got no strength at all, you know very well already how unsavory I am, matter of fact what a loser I am, on my ass all day eating, unemployed, without salary, and the fact that I love indulgently, live crudely, erratically, numerously, the fact that I’m scorning others, and for all that I still don’t have the spine to live quite as brutally as my deep wish is, to complete the self-portrait, like I already said, I decide to write about that one now, without biography, without mood, without name, without a single moral or immoral thing about that one, nothing at all, only to act out my impotent wish, downright tragic, I should find a way to erase that one, erase that one bit by bit, till that one’s extinct, there, there, the loser incapable of adding anything to this colorful diversity of existence, incapable of doing even one empty thing, right there, right there, the damn name watches me in a puddle of filthy water as I piss, a field of loser existence piss.

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

Let ordinariness in poetry be like the white
plastic chairs by the Wailing Wall.
In them, not in showy armchairs,
the old rabbis pray,
foreheads touching the wall’s stone.
Regular plastic chairs—
women and men climb up on them
to see each other over the partition.
And the mother of a boy celebrating his bar mitzvah
steps onto a chair and showers her son with candies
as he bids childhood good- bye.
Let ordinariness in poetry be like these chairs,
which vanish to make room
for a circle dance on the Sabbath.