Three From Small Chimes by Göran Sonnevi
I
Even the faces that love
carry the heart of treason and it won’t
cost you a thing We place
the face’s ass on top of somebody else
Every sleeping face in
the world The brittle girl
whose skin was made to tremble,
twitch at every word And
the coarseness of my face next to hers
My sleep’s heart was beating her
sleep’s heart She may already
have forgotten me, as one forgets
a dream I have not forgotten
her She was no dream
II
And the language will arrive at last
We do not know what’s first
or what is last The concepts will
define each other The re-
alities define themselves We
have named each other then What is
your name? I have already forgotten,
lost it The permutations were
too many We have been entangled for too
long Bone of each other’s bone
Word of each other’s word Now
we can’t be disentangled, can’t
be parted ever or at all? No—
Even now together we stand up
III
Young starlings are moving now
in the grass, green so far, before
the flight The blue tit beats on the pane
An airplane is heard in space
When death arrives it will arrive
in silence, later with an incredible roar
in burnt out ears An incredible
light, in blinded eyes
What help to us the darkness of an image
We have nowhere to go We are
no longer even like the children
or the birds Our souls whirl
in violent flight The vortex of our language
in the greater vortex; through its eye—
After the Swedish of Göran Sonnevi
by John Matthias with Göran Printz-Pahlson
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