Through the Forest

A spot they call Jacob's marsh
is the cellar of the summer day
where light sours to a drink
tasting of old age and slums.

Here the weak giants stand entangled
so thickly they cannot fall.
A broken birch tree molders
standing upright like a dogma.

From the deeps of the forest I rise.
It lightens between the trunks of trees.
It rains over my roofs.
I'm impression's water spout.

At the edge of the forest the air is mild.—
A big fir, dark. back turned.
its muzzle buried in the soil,
is drinking the shadow of the rain.

The Tree and the Sky

There's a tree walking around in the rain,
it rushes past us in the pouring grey.
It has an errand.  It gathers life
out of the rain like a blackbird in an orchard.

When the rain stops so does the tree.
There it is, quiet on clear nights
waiting as we do for the moment
when the snowflakes blossom in space.

Two pine-stems
shoot up and end in long hollow signal-drums.
Gone are the cities and the sun.
The thunder's in the tall grass.

It's possible to ring up the mirage island.
It's possible to hear the grey voice.
Iron-ore is honey for the thunder.
It's possible to live with one's code.

A Place in the Forest

On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up, that was all.  You
go there alone.  There is a tall building which consists entirely of cracks,
a building which is perpetually tottering but can never collapse.  The
thousand-fold sun floats in through the cracks.  In this play of light an
inverted law of gravity prevails:  the house is anchored in the sky and
whatever falls, falls upwards.  You can turn round there.  There you are
allowed to grieve.  You can dare to see certain old truths which are
otherwise kept packed, in storage.  The roles I have, deep down, float
up there, hang like the dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some
out-of-the-way Melanesian islet.  A childlike aura round the gruesome
trophies.  So mild it is, in the forest.

Tomas Tranströmer is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the Bonner Award for Poetry, Germany's Petrarch Prize, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.  He captures the mood of an era which is at once lonely and threatening.  Few poets are capable of relating basic truths about the human condition in troubled times with such quiet grace and figurative skill.

The selected poems were taken from a wonderful collection of Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (1954-1986), edited by Robert Hass and published by Ecco Press.

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