In the Bell-Pepper Light: Camilla Gripe
Autumn’s cutting-torch
strikes down with a goshawk’s brutality,
in painfully sharp contrasts
& blinding Buñuel cuts
through the field of vision this September 12th
by means of the sun’s merciless photon prod;
jabs me in the face over the book’s shield;
burns in my sight
around Ola Wikander’s account
of the peculiarities of Sumerian;
the hard will of the light leaning
out of the Kaldo furnace in the sky, bending forward
to have its steel sampled;
white with fury
The autumn light violates its way in at a low angle
now that summer’s soft felt shade has been taken down
from the bedroom window,
to its winter roost above my hitched-up reading knees,
to enable the September sun
& the bell-pepper plants to meet face to face,
now that the plants have begun freezing at night
out in the greenhouse in their great pots,
now quite happy to stare the star in its monocle
from my window,
point-blank
The plants’ sudden jungle
inside the East bedroom’s triple glazing
arouses a great tit’s interest,
as he delivers his rapid beak-knock
against the window ledge
to draw Homo sapiens’ attention
to the empty seed dispenser out there,
while a late housefly
buzzes its asymmetrical intermittence
in the space that has arisen
between the bell-pepper jungle & the triple-glazed window,
where the sun arcs:
a welcome buzz-realistic sonority
in a cobwebbed meditation,
which, despite my dead-language-study-difficulties
with Sumerian and Akkadian in the sharp light,
feels like a pleasantly inadvertent mimicry
of some old bewildered ageing person
talking to himself,
face turned away
The comfortable leather armchair in the room,
which has had to make way
for the bell-pepper invasion,
where the sun’s angle of incidence has just arrived,
I populate with key figures
from the past:
just now Camilla Gripe,
the dear, deeply headstrong one
in her cloud of baroque music and subtle wit,
with a fearsomely sharp intellect
& a creativity that screws itself
out of every vise;
former girlfriend of my two most important
youth gurus:
Lars-Erik Kjellström & Sune Karlsson
Now she sits in the dimensional portal of bell-pepper light
& smiles like Kuan Yin
out of a benign mysterium;
the day’s singing bowls resounding
on the wavelengths of light
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-09-12 at 13:39
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