On Toilets


When I hear on the radio
that someone says
he’s going down to Stockholm
from Sundsvall with his wife
to attend
the football match between Poland & Sweden tonight,
the first thing I think of is the toilets,
of which there ought to be plenty
at the arena,
but I try to imagine
how one gets there in the middle of the match,
among all the shouting, flag-waving, banner-raising
supporters;
how relieving it must be to stand there
in one of those welfare-state facilities
and let one’s water into white porcelain,
as if in a protected cell in hell,
only then to find one’s way back
out into the stands

When I think of the late Stockhausen,
I remember first & foremost
how we stood in the restroom
at the German Embassy in Stockholm in 2001,
just the two of us,
when he had come to Sweden to receive the Polar Prize
and had arranged for me to be invited to the embassy dinner
together with the Vice President
of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, Åke Holmquist,
and how the celebrated, slightly dissonant composer
stood there combing his thin hair with water,
before we went upstairs to dinner
with Ambassador Hans-Ulrich Seidt
and the smaller circle,
including Stockhausen’s two mistresses,
Kathinka Pasveer & Suzee Stephens

I remember that day in March 1977,
when I, with my heart in my throat
and my rucksack on my back,
stepped onto Bob Dylan’s property in Malibu,
past the carelessly (?) open wire gate,
silently rehearsing in my head
what I would blurt out
if we were to come face to face,
something that might persuade him
to invite me in for a recorded conversation

“I wonder if I could use the bathroom,”
I thought, as I stumbled along,
toward the poet’s turrets and towers,
high above the shimmer of the Pacific,
before the long-haired and resolute guard
came toward me with the words: “No visitors!”

I feel a profound lightness of being
whenever I happen to enter
a toilet, however small,
that has a simple latch
to fold down as a lock.
No lock can be simpler,
none less troublesome!
It has happened sometimes,
on local trains

Today my own toilet,
up here on the upper floor in Niemisel,
reminds me of the drying room
at the Kebnekaise mountain station,
since it smells in the same acrid way here,
of all my training clothes
hanging out to dry!




Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin The PoetBay support member heart!
Written on 2026-03-31 at 18:52

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