The Sea-Soaked Grand Swing's Offertory
During late evenings
in February,
when I walk to the stable
with buckets of water,
Venus has each time shifted position
high up in the vault
behind the tall farm spruce’s ladder to heaven
She shines,
like a steadfast star,
she freezes,
like a solitary bridesmaid,
the whole firmament she must defend,
and the air is bitterly cold,
but Anna is down in the run-in shed
mucking out
I am old;
did not know before what that meant;
do not know now:
am only a continuation
of a very young person
I have been young for a very long time
There is an itch in the faculties of reason
and I am wearing my soft-body
in the daguerreotype of a full-blown life
when the forests are white-faced
and the present moment hits a peak value
In earlier times we laid a piece of tarpaulin
in the bed,
between sheet and mattress,
because I sweated us soaking wet
in the labors of lovemaking,
and kicked down thick volumes
of dictionaries
when the ejaculations detonated
like distraction grenades
in Anna’s mighty docking organ
The 1,375-gram
Oxford Dictionary of English, Third Edition,
still stands without a spine
after one such overgrown session,
when I lay crosswise over the Great Dreamship’s
double bolster
like a loose crossbeam
through the trusswork of physical love
in the end phase of a sea-soaked grand swing,
with Anna’s sturdy farmer-mother breasts
in my mug,
and kicked the bedside bookshelf
into the middle of literature
so the titles flew like frisky sparrows
in the airspace
above the copulation-feverish
and their foaming enterprises
Nowadays hollow structural sounds move
through the night;
motions without physicality
through a deaf-mute sense of time;
a sequence of fasting days
and a chain of multi-morbidities
in the agrarian chronicle of health’s crown fields,
where the signs of wellness stand unravelled
like wool sweaters at Porkala
and the plovers’ hieroglyphic messages
in Karelian shore sand;
Bach-codes & Alan Turing-codas at the waterline,
Maltese-cross-frightened
in the terror-eyed devotions of a sea of people
and the anaphylactic superstitions of the poor;
loose goods, impoundments & inheritances
in the barter-wandering;
hirelings haggling by the running metre
and Euclidean arithmetic at Michaelmas,
the leukemia registers yellowing
far into the airy hospital ruins of silence
while the crofters’ moving carts jolt past
in old wheel-ruts
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-02-26 at 10:52
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