Made it home soaked to the skin, five miles in squall and downpour,
went through my keepsakes,
the written proofs,
and what should I believe among all the half-truths?
Wrote on the back of an envelope lying on the counter, I’m angry, and not everything is art, whereupon I picked all the magnets off the fridge and watered the clover on the windowsill,
shoved the dishes around as I washed them, because I hated doing them, just as I hated the deli counters in upscale supermarkets and the dog owners in Søndermarken, and I wanted to move back to Jutland and live in a henhouse and use empty beer cans for target practice, just to be close to something that seemed real, and dare to assume dance position and lead myself around the floor, utterly alive, three-dimensionally present with pulse and all,
for I will exist, So find me then, before I can’t feel myself anymore, I whispered out through my teeth, and then she found me, Kali, the angriest woman in the world,
and it isn’t that I don’t believe in the good in others.
It’s that the others don’t believe in the good in me.
~ ~ ~
Thought, It’s a long way from the dream of America to this, and remained prone.
Thought about scabs and chamomile tea.
Couldn’t make myself clear on the phone.
Couldn’t stand other people, so I went out among them, and I walked past thousands but saw not one.
Reasoned, Perhaps the part of me that once was in the us can still be found between the lines,
but that isn’t enough in the long run.
Went past the elephants, who were apparently doing well and, unaffected by anything, bathed in the pool and went on with their lives, trunk-flinging and backslapping, and on the way home I fainted in the cemetery behind a box hedge.
Cold sweat and hands asleep, daisies.
Remained prone afterward and relished the feeling of lost consciousness,
remained prone when the drizzle started,
remained prone until I could tell I was cold,
and then I got up and went out and looked for the next cemetery.
Reasoned, International Women’s Day would have torn me to shreds on the spot. But then it got me at last, and how many times do you have to hit out at a woman before she learns to duck?
Bought a hot dog on Toftegård Square
and didn’t want to go home, just to keep walking with the conviction that, if you keep walking, you’ll come to a day where you’re happy once more.
Reasoned, Perhaps the part of me that once was in the US has been placed in a pantry in my mind, from where she can be retrieved again
(but that isn’t enough in the long run).
Walked home
and scribbled this down: I am plagued by the vision of a faraway spring and my ability to read between the lines. I am a witness to my own truth in a flood of false evidence.
~ ~ ~
Slept as though I were two people, and one of me awake.
Called Mom, without whom my nozzles would be shot.
Thanked Kali, whose rage had driven me a small piece of the way out of the fog, this anxiety that reality will fail you, like late-night phone calls, cops at the door, others’ perpetual worrying, and then you sit there and have to insist that you’re doing it right and will manage, but after months of this you’re weighed down with belief fatigue.
Signed for a book and bore it from the post office through the supermarket and home.
Sang the same line again and again
and realized that, just because people aren’t walking around with drips and catheters or lying in recovery position in bedrooms full of empties, it doesn’t mean they’re intact.
Went for a run, strong in the legs, as if Kali had given me some of her primordial soup,
and it’s spring now,
and it is woman’s weakness to believe it’s because she isn’t good enough that things don’t go according to plan (and it is woman’s weakness that things should go according to plan).
Envied all of them who looked as if they were in the catbird seat, on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard for instance,
people I hadn’t heard from in years,
all of them who thought they knew better because they were doing better.
Wrote a thank-you note to Aunt Margrethe on the island of Fanø for the lovely amber necklace she’d sent
and sat there with Kali like a force in my body, for she’s screamed me a piece of the way,
I’m on course to getting smarter,
I’m not nearly as empty-handed as yesterday,
and I am standing.
~ ~ ~
Went over the coded signs and symbols.
Brushed my teeth and ate my breakfast.
Sat down with a book on a bench in the cemetery and listened to the singing gibbons from the zoo and the raucous sirens in the distance, and wounds are wounds, but not in the long run.
Picked up a dried-out dog turd,
cast it away while I yelled, To stifle things!
and spooked the retired ladies in Park Cemetery, whose dogs leave turds behind in the general offcasting of everything in life that we don’t want to bear around with us anymore
(but the soul has a long time horizon).
Scribbled down in the book’s margin, Diceyness is the worst, and then walked home to go on reading,
read all that which was written there, as one reads a paper on the lookout for one’s own obituary,
read as if the next subordinate clause might be my last, but I didn’t die,
and then discovered myself, like a quiet tremor in the hand during winter, and I cast away anxiety, for that which trembles in the hand one place is certainty in another, and diceyness is the worst.
Thought, If behavior made the globular woman at the pharmacy’s breasts grow, then what might not be growing in me right now? My mind, my grief, my heart?
Ate too many apples,
drank too much coffee,
so I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were going to solve a rebus,
or I’ll have to go to sleep as if I were two people and the other one awake,
I’ll have to go to sleep with legs entangled in something,
between the falling manna and the desert sand
I am discovered, I am,
and therefore can sleep.
~ ~ ~
It’s not the coffee that keeps me awake, it’s Kali.
Tried to work, but Kali goes around grousing in the corners, jealous and insecure, pouting lips and all.
Did laundry.
Bought new running shoes.
Received a book for translation and leafed through the next month’s work (while Kali grumbled), thought of Grundtvig (and Kali grumbled), wanted peace and quiet, wanted things brought back to earth (but Kali grumbled),
and it isn’t that I don’t like being the goddess of death, but I can’t stand still, I have to tromp on the floor in the laundromat, on the sidewalk, the grass, the ground, I thought
and went for a walk in the cemetery while the clothes were in the tumbler, and Kali cast dog turds, and as for me I scribbled down this inscription from Landlord Frandsen’s obelisk: