april and silence

Spring lies abandoned

A ditch the color of dark violet

moves alongside me

giving no images back.

The only thing that shines

are some yellow flowers.

I am carried inside

my own shadow like a violin

in its black case.

The only thing I want to say

hovers just out of reach

like the family silver

at the pawnbroker's.

~ Tomas Transtromer

translation by Robert Bly

from The Half-Finished Heaven

Bly's Commentary:

Tranströmer wrote this poem just before his stroke. Since then, he couldn't talk for 15 years. His mind is still alert. He communicates with his wife by writing. Could you sense the power of those last lines of his poem?— "hovers just out of reach / like the family silver / at the pawnbroker's." That's some image few American writers could invoke that Tranströmer does all the time.

morning bird songs

I wake up my car;

pollen covers the windshield.

I put my dark glasses on.

The bird songs all turn dark.

Meanwhile someone is buying a paper

at the railroad station

not far from a big freight car

reddened all over with rust.

It shimmers in the sun.

The whole universe is full.

A cool corridor cuts through the spring warmth;

a man comes hurrying past

describing how someone right up in the main office

has been telling lies about him.

Trough a backdoor in the landscape

the magpie arrives,

black and white, bird of the death-goddess.

A blackbird flies back and forth

until the whole scene becomes a charcoal drawing,

except for the white clothes on the line:

a Palestrina choir.

The whole universe is full!

Fantastic to feel how my poem is growing

while I myself am shrinking.

It's getting bigger, it's taking my place,

it's pressing against me.

It has shoved me out of the nest.

The poem is finished.

~ Tomas Transtromer

from The Unfinished Heaven

translated by robert bly

the couple

They turn the lights off, and its white globe glows

an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet

in a glass of darkness.  Then a rising.

The hotel walls shoot up into heaven's darkness.

Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, 

but their most secret thoughts begin to meet

like two colors that meet and run together

on the wet paper in a schoolboy's painting.

It is dark and silent.  The city however has come nearer

tonight.  With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

They stand packed and waiting very near,

a mob of people with blank faces.

~ Tomas Transtromer

translated by robert bly

from The Half-Finished Heaven

art by picasso

Vermeer

It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall

where the alehouse is

with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks,

and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence

everyone feels fear.

The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late,

boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets

– the wrong man’s –

ultimatum piled on the ultimatum,

widemouthed red flowers whose sweat reminds us of approaching war.

And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio

in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries.

Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson”

or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”

She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her.

The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.

Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs.

Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed

and stopped smack there

as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.

The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height.

It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall,

the pressure that makes each fact float

and makes the brushstroke firm.

Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,

but we have no choice.

It’s all one world. Now to the walls.

The walls are a part of you.

One either knows that, or one doesn't; but it’s the same for everyone

except for small children. There aren't any walls for them.

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall.

It is like a prayer to what is empty.

And what is empty turns its face to us

and whispers:

“I am not empty, I am open.”

~ Tomas Tranströmer

translation by Robert Bly

from The Winged Energy of Desire

art by Vermeer

solitude

I was nearly killed here, one night in February.

My car shivered, and slewed sideways on the ice,

right across into the other lane. The slur of traffic

came at me with their lights.

My name, my girls, my job, all

slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,

further and further away. I was a nobody:

a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded.

The headlights of the oncoming cars

bore down on me as I wrestled the wheel through a slick

of terror, clear and slippery as egg-white.

The seconds grew and grew – making more room for me –

stretching huge as hospitals.

I almost felt that I could rest

and take a breath

before the crash.

Then something caught: some helpful sand

or a well-timed gust of wind. The car

snapped out of it, swinging back across the road.

A signpost shot up and cracked, with a sharp clang,

spinning away in the darkness.

And it was still. I sat back in my seat-belt

and watched someone tramp through the whirling snow

to see what was left of me.

~ Tomas Transtromer

Tranströmer is the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. His other honors and awards include the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrach Prize in Germany, and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum.

He has read at many American universities, often with poet and friend Robert Bly. Tranströmer is a respected psychologist, and has worked at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives with his wife Monica in Vasteras, west of Stockholm.

from  poets.org