Reading Gregory Nagy's

“The Best of the Achaeans”

early in the morning

down here in my southern retreat,

in a slightly anxious atmosphere,

I'm taken off the text by sudden flashes

of the past

The lady next door

- our bedrooms wall to wall -

is moving to a smaller apartment

across the yard,

and I'm a bit apprehensive

about who the new tenant will be;

silent like the lady who's left,

or loud and difficult

Then I recall my one and only visit

to that apartment,

some time in the early 1990s,

well before the lady

- who at the time was my young son's childminder -

moved in, when a young man lived there

My cat Izzi (1980 – 1994)

had climbed from my balcony

over to the neighboring balcony,

and slipped into the young guy's place

I knocked on his door

He hadn't even noticed Izzi in there,

but I crawled in under his bed,

and pulled her out

He was quite surprised, and I was releaved,

as was Izzi!

When Izzi died in 1994,

I was heartbroken

and could hardly work

The feeling of utter darkness lasted

a couple of months

This poem has been sitting on my wall

since then:

“Man säger att Izzi är död,

men jag vet inte...
Jag begravde henne i skogen,

men jag vet ändå inte:
Lägenheten är full av hennes medvetande:
det slickas tass bakom gardinen,

det lapas sol,

det slinks undan bakom soffan,

det väntas med stora ögon

vid matskålen

man säger att...

men jag vet inte...”

English:

“They say that Izzi is dead,

but I don't know...

I buried her in the forest,

but I still don't know:
The apartment is permeated with her consciousness:

Paws are licked behind the curtain,

sun is being basked at the window,

there is a slipping out of sight behind the sofa,

waiting is obvious with big eyes

by the food bowl

They say that...

but I don't know...”

Simultaneously, this lightly anxious morning,

I come to think about my old friend Jon
(Jonathan B. Ross)

from Texas,

whom I and my then wife Judy socialized a lot with

when we lived in Dallas,

as he worked at Ernie's Delicatessen,

where we used to buy our bread

He sent me and Judy numerous cassette tapes

with his own compositions

and fantastic soundscapes,

after Judy and I had moved to Sweden in 1979,

and came visiting us over here twice

in the 1980s,

going on canoe trips and forest hikes with us

I've never had so much lingual fun with anyone,

as with Jon;

our conversations were brilliantly witty,

having us roar with laughter

'til we could hardly breathe!

Later, after Judy and I divorced in 1985,

and she moved back to the USA,

and I had become a single father here in Sweden,

he brought his newly wedded wife Jon-Etta

and flew over to visit us,

in November 1993;

not the, weather-wise, best part of the year...

Then Judy died, in 2009,

and I lost contact with Jon,

until the other day, after I got his email address,

he replied,

out of Duncanville, south of Dallas,

and flakes of life started falling around me,

with reflections stirring out of past situations

Simultaneously, in bed this morning,

surrounded by books, records, photographs

from earlier days,

I become aware of the emptiness of all this;

that none of this has any durability;

that any hardcore interest in those items

has worn off

and left my body as an object,

held down by gravity and lifted by anxiety

All of these items will surely burn

in a waste dump,

as surely as I will flicker for a few minutes

in the heatwave of cremation

I can go on reading Homeric texts,

but my eventual insights will not be spared