Michael Peverett: sheet-metal nights

Monday, February 17, 2020

sheet-metal nights

Pagham Harbour

An empty screen,
the rooftops' sheet-metal nights;
and the sky's tepidness!
Thus
I wanted to fly, slowly, that I might be anywhere
at once.

Conceived a sentence. Memorized it. Forgot.
Here, in the world, thus,
signing it.

The sky's freezing puddles, all along the shores
trees upended.
I am on my way toward a speaking point, against which
prying
one gets things right side upside down.

(Three untitled poems by Leevi Lehto)

*

I've just found out that the Finnish poet and translator Leevi Lehto died last year aged 68 (22 June 2019). I knew he was very ill, had been diagnosed with the dread condition MSA (multiple systems atrophy), but I didn't know how swiftly it had done its work.

A month before he died, he said, "Death doesn't scare me. Already in my childhood home, I learned to look beyond the current situation and not trust the truths. It is also better to keep hoping that my condition will improve, even if hope is impossible. I would like to continue to be inspired and inspire others". (https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/92352915-4b75-466c-b52d-277ffb7493bd .)

*

The three poems are perhaps about writing poetry, but not in a way that excludes those of us who don't write poems; it speaks to the part of all of us that wonders about reality. In different ways each of the three finds a way of saying that much of reality (three-quarters, say) can't be apprehended by the familiar methods.

These poems come from Lake Onega and Other Poems, a selection translated into English, mostly by himself. His English wasn't completely fluent and he turned this to his advantage; it was a wonderful instrument.

*

These poems, translated from Ihan toinen iankaikkisuus (Quite An Other Eternity, 1991), are within the register of Finnish modernism (reminiscent of Paavo Haavikko, maybe?), but Leevi Lehto kept on evolving; increasingly, as he lucidly put it, his poetry wasn't written "against the horizon of meaning", at any rate not the poet's own meaning. But I'm not getting to his later poetry in this post, I'll just quote some of the beautiful "Snowfall", from Kielletyt leikit (Forbidden Games, or Games Made Into A Language, 1994):

8
And even before you begin
to compose, words are named darkness in the light

9
And even before you say them, you have named them
all

10
the same
and their name is

11
from this world some
dumb food

12
a little of wine a
little of understanding, a little less
lessness

13
as if in the snowfall there could be as few as many as possible
flakes

14
you want to talk to me in a simple manner, but we
cannot see any of you from each other

15
That, I mean, means society: now,
when the door and the snowfall are two same things

16
and as thaw isn't an adjective or concrete

17
And two same things in the winter's bedroom is nonsense
and what else do I have to compare, to what

18
when inevitability and coincidence sleep separately
you, sweating, wake up in a forest through which only a path
passes