88.5 Acts of Intercourse
The geothermal heating rumbles softly
for the first time this autumn,
like the infrasound from the engine room
of a vibrating ferry to Finland
The rumbling awakens memories of Sirkka,
so beautiful, so close, so dead since October 3, 2023;
our 88.5 acts of intercourse meticulously recorded
in her notebook;
the last one a coitus interruptus
in a borrowed apartment
at 17 Mörbylund in Danderyd
when Sune Karlsson unexpectedly came home
roughly 50% into our proceedings
in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon
on August 15, 1985
Just the other day she appeared
in one of my poems,
or perhaps it was in a dream
The geothermal heating rumbles softly,
I lie stretched out in silent thought
Time surges around the bow of the Per Albin house in Niemisel
Out there in the autumn, death goes dragging its feet
beneath the moon
Sirkka picked me up for Ghostbusters
on Viking Song's dance floor out in the Gulf of Finland
at 3 a.m. on December 6, 1984,
Finland's Independence Day,
and the adultery was wide open,
carried through body & soul,
with eyes wide open in wild enthusiasm
and honesty as vast as the heavens!
There was plenty of headroom for our lack of hesitation in the cabin,
in an offense I've never regretted,
but on the contrary cherished from beginning to end,
and framed in a place of honor in episodic memory
But in October 2026 the world wavers
in the slight dizziness of a grainy governance
and an uncertain role in life;
a bite of the tongue,
a groping through the dark toward the toilet
In the old man's peculiar freedom of speech
I hold forth incomprehensibly yet convincingly
to myself in tongues & saliva,
so that everyone can hear the sloshing
in the communicating vessels
of my curses & blessings;
in the interchangeable positions
of my dismissals & concessions,
before everything, or a small part, or an ounce,
returns to the grammatically matter-of-fact
in Marianne Faithfull's and my habits
of writing a little upon awakening
and just before falling asleep,
when something crawls up
out of the crevasses of consciousness
with its face concealed
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-10-09 at 10:47
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