From “The Coming of Winter,” section II of CARTA MARINA

 

 

December 10

 

 

Vargtimmen—

 

the wolf hour, my friend on her farm tells me how the wolves

come back to Uppland, I imagine them hungry,

 

the bag of night draws tight as they approach,

as they converge

from every corner of the map, heads low, thick-ruffed necks stretched out,

the ragged silence

and their paws

soft on the earth, spit-glint on their teeth,

they sniff the quick

blood trace of hare, the piss of dachshund, poodle,

 

I wake every night at the wolf hour, the night, then night

grown yellow, electric with snow,

 

wake taut with him, shaken, of whom I do not, dare not, dream—           

 

 

                                                                                                            December 16

 

 

Red taillights lead me uphill, downhill—

I watch them from the bus’s steamy window,

 

pressing my cheek against cold glass

as I’m carried from the airport past fields and factories,

past Märsta in the midnight

 

where the old men still hunt elk-moose

till bloody haunches fill their freezers.

 

It’s not this man or this man, not

these golden daughters or this dream-ravened swaddle:  

no, it’s the doors closed or the doors opened,

 

it’s the heart gone night. The gods

stream back and forth across the threshold.

 

You can ride it, you know,

get on the dark bus and let it carry you.

That’s how I’ve always been, going home, going nowhere—

 

uphill, downhill, the taillights like rubies,

past fields where the trees are just darker effacings.

 

 

                                                                                                            December 17, 4 a.m.

 

 

            I know how to find you.

            I go where your sleeping

            is filled with the shadows

            of leaves, where the leaves have

            bled their green,

            and all that remain are

            their skeletons, nearly

            transparent, translucent,

            and tissue gone blurred as

            the moon among clouds, as

            the fur on a moth’s wing,

            and tips as if trailing

            through water…

 

            Such leaves are not common.

            In this snowy country

            they cherish them, save them,

            the white skelettbladen—

            like us, they have died, to

            become more enduring.

 

 

                                                                                                            December 18

 

 

They tell me that in the old times people

would light candles and just sit in the dark,

resting, being in the dark, and so I

have lit candles and though Uppsala spreads

around me and the Incan music weaves

up from the street where three men are playing,

collecting coins in a hat on the ground,

and though I hear the busses and sometimes

clanking, in what my husband once called this

soulless apartment, here is the shining

dark. We have not solved the problem of love,

have we? My small paper city

waves its banners and candlelight glints

and gleams on its red foil towers, its gold

and emerald windows, its silver domes

and star shield. The candles by the window

are flickering; on the table, calm

and seeking upward, they are like breath

that barely hovers at the threshold of the body.

 

*

 

Oh no, Horsey, we have not solved the problem of love.

 

            Friend is just a word.

                        Love is just a word.

                                    In love is just two words...

 

And if God is both infinitely far off, and everywhere,

this corresponds to the two motions of the soul,

toward hunger and toward plenitude—

 

My stillborn daughter’s hair beneath my hand

fragile as snow,

and the hot, sweaty scalps of the boisterous children.

 

For the force behind the movement of time

is a mourning

            that will not be comforted—

 

While sirens go by at 3 a.m., sawing the air

                        with their Swedish unhurried urgency,

                                                and after the bars close, students

            pour into the streets below,

shouting and chattering

and smoking too many cigarettes,

                        and my husband sleeps beside me,

                                                            beloved, actual,           

 

You will gallop me to the edges of the map

                        and I will lie down there

            to the ones that pass

                                    like electrolysis

                        through and through the far fields of my body.

 

My tongue will cleave to the roof of my mouth

                        and my hands will burn and shake, lifting love

            up from my belly,

                                    up from my heart, throat, and away from me,

                                                                        giving it

                        into the night air

                                                as you, Horsey, graze peacefully on ice shards.

 

 

                                                                                                            December 21

 

 

This is the last day of the gathering dark and I want it to go on forever.

 

It eats the sun that keeps me from my monsters.

 

Trucks start up in the dark. Advent lights,

those bulbed wooden trees, are shining in every window,

and the river, its savage braidings,

tightens and tightens, live still over the race, but sullen, whitening.

We’re on countdown as sun smears blood at 3 p.m. on the horizon.

In the sacred grove of Gamla Uppsala—

the pagan burial mounds three miles outside the city—

what a howl must have gone up

from the furred starving ones, when nine of every creature

hung from the trees: males including kings, gutted.

 

I don’t want solstice yet, don’t want the bowl nearly brimming

with black

to tip toward light,

don’t want the bushes to stand up tall

with their sticky buddings.

 

My teeth clamp shut to keep a fox from leaping from my throat.

 

                        I want to fall and fall into a featherbed, a kicked twist of covers.

 

I want to suck this ragged fruit pit.

 

                                                My body is shivering like swampfire.                                                                                                                             

 

 

 

© Ann Fisher-Wirth