Eternity lasts a long time,
and I thought, Everything is so lovely, even the cinquefoil’s blooming,
and then we stood there and looked at it, me and Kali, we looked at the cinquefoil, which didn’t know any better (don’t smite it, Kali),
but then she smote it, she smote it on the yellow petals
because it ought to have known better,
it might have known that,
that this was how it would turn out,
that it would turn out how it did,
it might have known
everything!
~ ~ ~
Was awakened by the heat.
Went to the flea market on Tullinsgade.
Watched a bagpipe band march through Værnedamsvej and continue out to the Vesterbro quarter, and God knows where they are now.
Was at the home of someone I know and not a peep from Kali, Kali just sat there while we looked at pictures and spoke of the sort of things that women can speak of, sunscreen and our time in the Women’s Army Auxiliary, and in the absence of things to abuse, Kali took the back stairs and skedaddled, so I biked home alone.
Went for a run in the new running shoes,
ran, but fell at precisely the same spot where I’d always thought, I’m going to fall there someday.
Washed my knee off at the playground faucet, where kids were standing in line with their butts bare, and I stood in the back of the line like one of them, thinking scrapes were a chance to be comforted and expecting to pick off the scabs slowly soon afterward, and it would be a summer without short dresses.
Stopped by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave and looked at the birch tree that was planted over his coffin in 1903, bearing witness that Vilhelm Kyhn is extremely alive today.
Felt tired,
let things lie beside each other—
the frying pan, the dishrag, the joy, together with the insecurity and the French press; the shoes; the being inside, but outside, unseen, but discovered; the being hurt and the recovering, present, smarter, potentially happy, and entangled in will; and the dish towel — everything coordinated with a little prayer:
Have patience and confidence until the end.
~ ~ ~
Ate an apple in the middle of the night as the light seeped in over from Sweden.
Biked into Kastellet,
drank tea on a bench in the shade of a tree by one of the bastions,
plucked grasses and Queen Anne’s lace,
made the dust rise on the paths
and looked at that bronze angel who wants to walk across the water to southern Sweden, and it was chillier this winter, I thought, much chillier, and knowing that is something no one can take from me, but I can’t share it, I bear it with me like a song stuck fast in the throat, like when I was supposed to sing “The Blessed New Day” for confirmation,
and all that love has not been able to find peace since.
Watched a wooden ship squeeze into Copenhagen’s harbor (as if it were long ago).
Watched a man eat his meal by himself at a restaurant on Borgergade (as if it were long ago).
Biked through the city, just one person on wheels among thousands of others on the way home to their own, exhausted and holding every conceivable unshareable thing inside,
rubbed the skins off new potatoes
and set the grasses in a vase on the counter,
thought of blackbirds and other singing creatures,
of all there’s been, and tomorrow,
of my obligations, my dreams, my dusty sandals,
and then that which despite everything still calls,
Come.
~ ~ ~
Said, Now you’re going to take one day at a time.
Said, And this is the first of those days you’re going to take one at a time
and stood up then and had run out of milk.
Walked past the cemetery pigeons, and it isn’t that life goes on but that it’ll never stop,
was in the Frederiksberg Gardens,
hesitated by the pacifier tree and recalled Mom standing in a campground kitchen with a Swedish woman and a Dutch woman, the three of them busy looking into the bottom of a saucepan and taking ticks off some kid, and I never offered up even a single pacifier to the pacifier tree on the path to the Chinese Pavilion.
Bought a strawberry ice cream cone and couldn’t grow up, no matter how much I might want to.
Took the words from my mouth and laid them in a small white coffin.
Read in the shade of a cemetery tree,
read page after page in the scent of warm box and felt pain in my tooth,
but that didn’t matter.
Stopped by Kyhn’s grave on the way back, and it was the roses,
centifolia, multiflora, and Astrid Lindgren, and there I stood and set aside everything I hoped for, and it was as if he turned his head from his verdigris bronze plaque and gazed down at me:
Why, there we have you then, woman,
hover flies about your face
and utterly alone.
~ ~ ~
Stayed in bed taking another’s downfall to heart,
and stones deliberately thrown in the other Zealand blazed through me as if on a sonar, and now I don’t know what I fear most: the sound of bones being crushed against the floor or things that rise up in the air, that which we never forget or that which we brush off, pistols against temples or threats pointed inward, the inertia of sorrow or its release.
Promised to go to Tivoli (but declined the carousel in advance).
Went for a walk in the afternoon heat.
Had to stop frequently to rest a bit, for as soon as I feel alone inside, someone else steps on the stage.
Sat down by the goldfish pond,
thought of Indians, of clear skies and endless plantations. Thought of America, the heat, and another, of how I’d do violence to myself if I didn’t revisit those places that I had, without much success, already afflicted with my plaints.
Longed for the smell of winter’s cottages when they’re opened up in June.
Longed for northwest Jutland and read poems in the shade,
wanted to forget everything I hadn’t had, and which I should prepare to lose,
and chose the music on the lawn,
the soft ice cream and the helium-filled balloons,
the doubt, the sham happiness,
for I don’t know what I fear most, the sound of bones being crushed against the floor, or the sight of a child’s hand letting go of the string on Bugs Bunny
as easy as nothing.
~ ~ ~
Woke and rattled my arms.
Biked to the Open Air Museum in Brede.
Walked first thing into a house from Fanø, and something’s missing in this Zealandic heath — the local dances, the wading birds, or perhaps just Aunt Margrethe and a coffee machine.
Went from house to house.
Inhaled the smell of a lost hay cutting and the sight of that feathered wing hanging above it all, and I know I’m doing the right thing, and I know that it hurts (but just like birth, such things can be endured), I know that, just like I know that houses no one lives in no longer exist, and I want to exist.