Meng Chiao at Norbäcken
I read Meng Chiao
aloud to myself: Cold Creek –
but think of Norbäcken Creek,
where Meng Chiao draws me
out into this fresh northern Swedish day
in August,
a couple of kilometers from home;
in his poetry as startlingly corporeal
as my bare feet,
stepped out of boots and socks,
stepped down into Norbäcken's cool forest current
inside the forest gloom,
draining the brown-bear marshlands
high upstream
Meng Chiao speaks to me
from the murmuring creek water,
from thermodynamics' circular life-givings,
in the current around my ankles,
which after a while numbs my feet
among the murmuring koans of the great dark forest,
in a woodland room of trunks, uprooted trees,
boulders, mosses, ferns, twinflowers,
and the gleaming stones
on the creek's water staircase down toward the middle marsh,
where the creek serpentines deep
into the dark earth beneath the opening of the sky,
which lets the light fall almost carelessly
across the marsh's Labrador tea and cottongrass,
before the creek flows on,
to reach Lake Västiträsket a kilometer or two later
with its small open patches of water lilies
and reed-grown reaches,
a pair of cranes stepping on their long legs,
until, much later, the creek runs out
into the mighty Råne River,
calm and irresistible,
which carries it onward to its outlet
in the Gulf of Bothnia
Meng Chiao
sits on a stone beside me
in the eighth century,
as present
as the whispering in the trees
and the murmur of the creek:
Norbäcken
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-08-05 at 12:06
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