Hugo Claus
Even Now
from Registration [1948]
For the Poet Antonin Artaud
Among us, the strays, the strangers,
the ones who never landed, the deranged,
a pale captain has died.
I see the arteries in his temples
no longer throbbing.
His face, a carved paving stone,
has finally stopped moving.
That we are scarred for life
is clear to them, the balanced souls,
the undisturbed characters,
in all their level hours.
They broke his fragile back.
They locked him up with a chair and bread and straw.
They called him mad and sick.
They pitied him.
I will meet him still
under bridges, in the empty train station.
He will put his arm around my shoulder.
Towards morning he starts drilling,
shaking my fibres,
until I scream, Artaud, Artaud.
I see the arteries in his temples
no longer throbbing.
Break the belt of impotence.
Crack the shell of infertility.
My dead greyhound, my ravaged tower,
my bleeding, stillborn,
burnt-out man, Antonin Artaud.
from Without Due Process [1950]
I
We’ve known it now for centuries,
that the moon is dangling by a thread
attached to heaven, hell or nothing at all.
That the thick blue paint of night
is drooping down into the streets
to wrap around you like a deep blue robe
this evening when you head for home,
dawdling ne’er-do-wells, theatre and recital-goers,
nighthawks, people who are alive,
and that the night will soon be washed away
like cheap blue ink from years ago
and afterwards the pale, pink skin
of heaven, hell or nothing at all
will shine through and no longer pale,
especially not the pink nothing like a girl’s
soft and salty sex,
and afterwards heaven and hell and nothing at all
will dry out, go mouldy and decay,
just as old loves and bad habits,
doses of the clap, faithful pieces of furniture
and bunkers from pre-1914 must die,
with no one’s help, in a corner, on a sandstone slab,
like cunning old crabs must die.
III
In autumn and in wet winters
there are days when nothing happens
in the house. Nothing except breaking the past,
like breaking a day that’s passed in glass,
like melting chunks of pond ice,
so that its number’s up, the past’s, its number is up.
But the past and today just won’t lie down,
they turn circles on a carousel, joining hands,
becoming weeks again and months and finally seasons.
There are days
that the clocks of every tower in the land
run half an hour slow
and not one of those winter people notices,
and the lost half hours, saved by no one,
ride through villages and towns, unseen, behind trams
and horse-drawn carts and clump together to form a day,
the way that snow makes a man of ice,
a day of ice for the lonely,
for whom every night is holy
like tonight.
from The Joyous and Unforeseen Week [1950]
1
It can rain and it can blow,
but the magpie still speaks on Sunday,
the day of dogs and the blind.
Oh, Sun-sham-day.
To the wooden priest in his box
I whisper, For me, defused, deactivated,
deadened, despairing,
this day is no valid reason.
4
Beside the water where the grass grows
like the hair of dead women
the girls lie on Friday nights,
surprising passers-by with a glimpse
of thighs in stockings with a sailor
in between.
Unshakeable confidence
steals up on you then, oh, Freya-day stroller,
you wide-branching bridegroom.
from Bounds [1955]
Home
Father was eating partridge and Mother wasn’t there
and me and Joris were talking murder
and fleeing and which trains to take
when the sun rolled into the loft
and lay there shining in the hay.
Father cursed and said, God sees me.
Joris fled
and I kept playing with the trains
which ran across the floor
on electricity.
from A House Between Night and Morning [1953]
Exercises
7
Tonight, the whatever of May, at nine p.m.,
On the dirt road past the young and rustling corn,
In the froth of the summer rain,
I was misfortunate enough to think of you.
I thought:
If you’re gone, if you desert,
If you want to be dead to me,
If you want to cower in the brothel of forgetfulness
With your arms over your head,
If you want to walk off unnoticed from one day into the next,
If you want to play with memory’s pearls,
Tying memory around your neck like a wreath.
I thought:
Where will be the grace in life’s bird cry,
Where will be the grace in day after day of
Swollen sickening time?
Gistel By Bruges
Village of cows and willows,
Church tower and rhododendrons in rows.
In a curtain of rain
In a fold of the sky and in the light,
The bronze mayor sits on a bronze box.
Moss from the palm of your hand,
Rain from the whites of your eyes,
Hedge tops from your lashes,
Hills of ochre from your breast,
And the folds of the whole country from your body.
And the ringed bulls bellow
Through the circle of hay to the open fields,
But the nearby cows don’t make a sound.
A Rendezvous
Again you say, Bye and Goodnight,
Words that come at me with the crooked gait
Of the tortoise in the kitchen.
The fourteen monkeys in the garden
Cower under the rhubarb leaves,
Huddling together to weep in the rain.
The wire that clangs against the smoke-stained walls
When the wind gets up.
The last cigarette. The smoke. The ash.
We have got 30 years left to live
And then centuries.
The lift starts up. The footsteps in the hall.
I tremble briefly. You’re caged in now