A Sandahl's Width of Night
My narrative unfolds in real timeas I sigh and breathe, wordlessly,
without letters,
and it is dark outside, dim inside
The door in here
to the Eastern bedroom
stands ajar a sandal’s width,
to give the Silver Cat a chance
to slip in during the night
and sleep by my feet
– and slip out again whenever he wishes
From a distance I hear myself breathing,
slowly, unmanned, in the background,
with the autopilot engaged,
while the room loyally provides me
with space
and floating horizontals
I unfold in real time
through the personality’s feral hall of mirrors,
through the dream-sleep’s brutal unveilings,
through the ages’ precise computer tomography,
phase after phase,
shifted like slate and rare earth metals
in culture-layered artifices,
shaping the spirit of the age
and the humus-murmur of languages
down in the tunnel systems’ brown-rumbling sarabandes,
Bach-primatized conditions of life
in cries of prayer and curses,
in long deaths,
in the stout sexual belongings of short lives;
the doctrines of the world hanging
like votive offerings in a roofed cathedral,
without demand or goal,
like the shirts and suits
of a dead police superintendent,
while rain beats against the window
and someone lets something slip
At any moment the roof may open
and the house draw breath
into infinity
My faculties of the soul remember
Werner Aspenström’s poem Ice Report,
which he, death-stricken, read for Swedish Radio
at Södersjukhuset in January 1997,
when he felt himself lift the roof off the hospital
and transform the sickroom into an observatory,
noting Eternity as unchanged, indeterminate,
neither one thing nor the other
His grandchild,
then a girl in her late teens,
passed a few times during the 90s by my booth
at passport control at Skavsta Airport,
and we exchanged a few words in passing
about her grandfather
I saw her pride,
and her love for the grandfather / the poet
My thought drifts unclothed, faded, unreal
in real time through the narrative,
far beyond reach and control;
reading cumbersome worlds
beyond the jurisdictions of the senses;
dangerously free in Icarus-space,
while the house endures for years, to the century’s end;
turns its gable toward the weather,
tightens shingles and rafters,
opens the window and yawns,
falls asleep and dreams
of a new roof and soft paw pads,
the wild-wife’s bedroom in twilight,
mine in the midst of dawn,
life’s span colossal
while the posturings of wars beneath the horizons
live on heavy breathing
and the rosary of heartbeats
in urgently summoned liturgies of battle
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
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Written on 2026-03-05 at 14:35
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