from snow to hydroelectric

22

I went once in the snow. From the moment

                                you breathed it you breathed

the prolonged continuity of that subzero.

It was the beginning of April, the birch-forests

    all black sweeps, the zigzag frozen

river.  And the pylons looked like wheelchairs

                                      outside a hospital.

23

    Something like the forest sea

The beautiful simplicity of their

                                      heads,

whose rounded, knobbly thoughts

    are entirely of them, of the life

that excludes me. The shape of a head

    is a history, so plastic as an infant is

to the simple (unanalyzable) subcutaneous

patterns of the nation, the thing that

    affects us into stereotype. The child

      sleeping on the train, gawky-limbed,

is already with the national expression,

    though Mum is Chinese. Is it the

Swedish words that shape the face?

    Perhaps – not how you pronounce them

but what you have to say, who you

             have to be,

the way anyone can live here, and

            the skiing, they,

wild strawberries and

    the factories by the lake, totalities,

                                       toilet paper...

24

[   W O O D

M A G I C  ]

The whole wailing body of the nyckelharpa
is spruce that is still being sawn at.
Sun glitters on the river of Joel Böhlén
in the music, but the shade of the woods
drips in the chilly summer evening,
but the music spools without comment
in the sawing hands of the old men,
but the mushrooms bloom on the needle earth.

25

Shell    Gazprom    Murmansk   Putin   Sarin

26

Attachment loyalty sentiment frozen

nostalgia return no return emptiness

guilt and postured guilt, regret and

                                    insincerity.

Emptiness of a teeming forest, deeper

                                             in –

if I was writing this in the forest!

Fake, flounder, blankness, indifference,

dead grass, bond and bonding

    with the last empty never-satisfied

wave of the evening close in

    a wood where you’ve never been,

though you’re still there, terrified of

it, night closes, a chocolatey

      night from the wrong climate

and you fidget on the happy fringe of

      a real life, histrionic performance

hide everything from the moss,

    the fringeing pines and dark

strawy waving of defiance flags.

27

Daylight sees in all the gaps.

    The walls and the door are all

                 thin deal, a box of light;

I could pilot it up into the midnight

                                      pallor

       I feel I could hover

high over the woods, high over the houses,

    the whole hydroelectric valley