Field of Rage

Where are you going with your anger
child,
when the way is blocked by words
you do not understand,
and your fear is larger
than your punishment –

Where are you going with your hate
when your mother
thoughtlessly
misconstrues your seriousness,
and strangers laugh
at your game –

You pat a field
into the box’s willing sand
and sow
your anger’s first seed.
You play your game
of dead dolls.

Tell the upright men
in the world
that they must harvest
your ripened hate
and plow your field of rage
before they meet your gaze.

The Day’s Ruin

On the edge
between day and night –
a burned-out castle ruin
with smouldering contours
in the ether-green air.

Sinister clouds
rise
like petrified smoke
from cracks
in a half-charred tower.

A ruin,
where fire has etched holes
in crumbling walls,
and exploded rooms
glow without ceiling,
a smouldering ruin extinguished,
sinks into the night
and disappears.

Silent Birds

Black earth-eyes
stare somberly
through holes
in the snow’s worn bedsheet.
The neighboring farm’s thatched roof
drips monotone
melodically into puddles
along the barn’s damp wall,
yellow stucco flaking
at the hatches in the gable.

In an overgrown apple tree
sit five silent birds
dreaming
about the sun that went down
while they sang
in distant summers.

Lake Mälar Sunset

Like a spine of sharp teeth
in a fire-filled
dragonmouth,
a thousand black pines jut
above the lake’s opposite shore.
Whitish breath
rises sheer as veils,
as if the dragon’s hot limbs
had sunk in the Mälar waters.

From its red firemouth
flames are flung
into the sky.
The day is burning –
burning silently
and lost.

Across the horizon –
heavy ash-dark clouds
and the weak flimmer of flame
after the everyday
apocalypse.

Jackdaws and crows
flap around a weatherbeaten treetop
like an army of scavenger birds
shrieking miserably
an elegy
over the rocks, the burnt forest
and the waveless water.

Douglas Fir

The urge to be a squirrel emerges unexpected
before this mast of the woods, this trunk
rising from the ground steep to the sky
vertical
by a will more erect and more
striving than I am used to
perpendicular
to the earth’s skin.
My eye jumps frolicking, neck-breakingly
up there, upward.
The urge to be a squirrel makes my behind
itch
my tailbone strangely more noticeable, something
is sprouting, erupting, my nails stretching
longer, slightly folding, curling,
hungry for the bark’s coarse crust,
useful decayed antiquity
wrapped ‘round the wood like a tall
closed robe
far above, full of sleeves –
arms –
stretched towards the wind’s many corners.
The urge to be a squirrel carries upward
carries eartufts topmost
carries fur and hindmost the tail
indian-red hirsute,
flight’s airy banner-hung joy-stick
– not wings
not the bird’s talent-bearer –
glide-flight’s unparallelled tool
into the side of the neighboring tree.
The urge to be a squirrel darts upward again,
jeers, whines, scolds shrilly
down at someone’s empty
abandoned boots below
by the trunk.

October

Leaning back against a sun-warmed stone,
hear starlings
crackling like charcoal,
sputtering and burning
among mature chestnuts.

See a sunshower tighten its bow,
stretching a bridge
between down and up,
lowering its knowledge about near November
into oblivion’s unmeasured shaft.

Linking a shard of your life
to the dry grass in October,
collect a small awkward thanks
in your cap
for the thigh-violin man’s cutting melody.