Sune & Camilla II
If I breathe calmly, everything resolves
along the thin chamois-skin corridor of clarity
over memory’s steel plains,
in a resistant science-fiction sort of way:
Sune & Camilla
in brisk stride across the Folkunga Bridge,
around the corner into Östra Trädgårdsgatan,
and immediately the gravel path into the yard
to Lilla Strömgatan III,
up over the veranda, into the hallway,
past my door, up the bend of the wooden staircase
and into the apartment,
luxuriously equipped with a small hall
that even had a water closet;
a repetitive arrival ceremony in autumn 1971,
winter into 1972,
after the unexpected moving-in together
that really ought to have been foreseen
before my America trip late summer ’71,
Sune in his imago, exceedingly stylish, dazzlingly beautiful,
with glossy black fringe, burning eyes,
dressed entirely in white
– and Camilla; connoisseur of language & thought,
feline, edgy & purebred, with upturned nose, long nails
& looks like cutting torches, life-intense:
the very finest the local world-situation had produced;
both their beings unconditional, total, one-hundred-percent
in near-brutal genius
Their excellence could be almost frightening
to those present
during the Handel & Tchaikovsky evenings
on the carpet at Maria & Harald Gripe’s
on Fruängsgatan 37
– but then, upon my return from the USA
in November 1971
the apartment upstairs
in the 19th-century house
at Lilla Strömgatan III was Sune’s & Camilla’s,
with the cats Lusse & Lucia,
and the house permeated
by the fateful brilliance
that the uncompromising two, helplessly & inexorably,
conferred upon their surroundings,
in an artist-relationship on the knife-edge,
so tear-worthily beautiful,
like a classical Greek tragedy
or a medieval ballad,
which no one – perhaps not even,
or least of all – the young lovers,
understood the dangers of,
when the medieval love-tale turned
into 1970s grey-weather realism,
and Princess Camilla left her Knight Sune,
and the castle on Lilla Strömgatan III transformed
into a rickety demolition house with dangerous wiring
and drafty rheumatism rooms,
as the tale’s shimmer quickly became sleeplessness
and poor appetite
in a shack in an alley
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
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Written on 2025-11-02 at 13:19
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