3 POEMS | GÖRAN SONNEVI

*
I said to you,
I am not human
And you
looked at me
and said, no
perhaps you
are not



Then I began to vanish
dissolving from within
until not even
my shell remained
Not even
my skin, the human
shell
And you
touched me
as if I
did not exist

And inside,
inside me
was
night streaming, streaming night
whirling
and starless Not
a single
human star

When I touched you
with my fingers of night
you, too, dissolved
you were
water
between my fingers

[From A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, Princeton University Press, 1993, translated and edited by Rika Lesser. Original Swedish in Dikter utan ordning (Poems with no order), 1983.]

*

from MOZART’S THIRD BRAIN by Göran Sonnevi

CXXXIX

Returning We are in the city of memory It is creation's
first morning A great tit is singing I go out to
the trees, the houses, get the paper from the mailbox, lightly
rimed with frost The sun rises behind the houses
over the snow, over human beings That's how it always is
The brimstone butterfly and the orange underwing flew The snow
already melting quickly, but still there in the shade Then
I also saw a peacock butterfly, a small tortoise-shell, and a comma
Out of the abyss of politics I think Almost nothing is
what it seems to be The screens are called deception, self-
deception, individual or collective Hell's
forms move Verily we shall be with one another
in Paradise I finish reading the book on Shostakovich; it
presents a crushed man; except when in deep concentration,
where he is in music, in his ultimate seriousness, despair
I think about the forms of the hippocampus, the art of fixing memories That
new thoughts are as dreams; if they are not quickly ob-
jectified, they disappear I touch the blinding sound
I try to phone my mother, who has pneumonia
but there's a busy signal I understand, that in the great listening
I shall hear voices, the voice ahead of me Even if listening
is simultaneous through all time About music and violence; in this
impossibility Everything simultaneous; in this love Now
the voices are summed Even the voices of the dead come from in front, as from
an infinite absence But all music comes out of this infinity
Listening-receiving Total reality such as it comes to me
The unheard-of, potential, imaginary world of sound Of which
mathematics is only a small part Or vice versa There is no
difference We are listening-inward That which comes into actuality
comes with its blinding Or with its satisfaction, its delight

1V

Once again
the sea shall leap up, from the highest point Where
we imagine the limit to be, precisely where we tran-
scend The sea roars below the cliffs; the diabase veins
protrude like spines We are their
rhythms, also, in the greater rhythmic system; in our
provisional attempt at counterpoint
I, too, play the second voice; in colors;
in transformations; also in the transformations of fear
The sea of fear and the sea of joy; identical; in the play of light
of valuations, beneath wandering clouds, their
shadows, lightning, oblique downpours
I walk into the wind; its pressure against my face
See the islands, the heights, the rocks The city,
in the upper corner of the bay, shrouded in smoke
I was also part of its chemistry; when I was defined
The transformations just go on
The islands of poverty and social decay
need not be embedded
in some overriding imperial or economic structure,
I understood, yesterday, since long ago Refugees come
wearing their veils, their darkness, their colors
We are part of this transformation, we act, the trans-
mutations in what is humanity will
go on; then we will pay the price;
or else everything is already worthless, gold . . .

If song will again be possible is not for us to decide –

[From Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain, Yale University Press, 2009, translated by Rika Lesser.]


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