Angel Towers of the River Valley
Last night,
while I was roller-skiing
out on Gunnarsbyvägen,
the sky behaved
like the science-fiction oil painting
of a futurist artist;
exaggeratedly metallic blue, evening-clear,
serene as an old person without remorse –
(but in its improbability impending,
impersonally threatening
like the numbed conscience of an entire people
before a genocide
that leaves people untouched)
the air humid
after the day’s knuckle-hard rain showers,
with isolated dazzling-white cloud pillars
rising several kilometers out of the forests,
above the river & all the lakes & marshes,
like angel towers or the whitewashed chimneys of Hades;
sparse, entirely thunderless, death-silent;
without known agendas or motives
When I turned
on the still rain-wet asphalt
and poled homeward,
the same way I had come,
several overwhelming pillars had risen
from the earth;
one of them, on the other side of the river –
particularly immense,
broader & more massive than the others –
directly in front of the low-standing September sun,
and therefore brutally black,
enclosed by a golden sun-god-Doré corona
against the clear-blue metal sky’s stainless hint of autumn,
with its dazzling-white towers
like faceless totems in groups along the horizon;
everything utterly silent,
as if the world were deaf,
seemingly motionless,
yet gradually, evidently, in development;
an overpowering, irresistible movement
in the sparse cloud pillars’ ultrarapid dance
in sublime elevation,
as in a Norse or pre-Greek myth,
or a wound-up Faroese chain dance
without either voice or words;
a ghostly enchantment
realized over Norrbotten,
adorning the halls of space as never before
I stopped with my eyes open,
hanging on my poles
At night the rain fell again,
in sudden downpours,
like booming surprises
over the sheet-metal roofs,
only to die away again at once,
like the final sigh of a great church organ
before the congregation begins to stir,
break up, gather their things,
rise from the pews,
move out into the center aisle
and gradually empty the great space of the nave,
one by one,
or in small groups;
the priest standing in the doorway
with his farewell
as the churchgoers’ authorization to live their lives
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
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Written on 2026-09-04 at 14:33
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Clara Mae Gregory |
