Thursday 15 November 2007

henrik nordbrandt

you resting in me

like a secret
sealed-up water lily
you rise through the dream
my dream
while i sink down into yours
as if we were scales
endlessly shifting balance
the heavier
always in the other’s dream.

i rest in you
like dark waters
in your mouth, drinking of your dream
like a figure of stone
farthest down in the dream
you bear me, your face
bends over me, turns to stone
over mine –
as a light increasing in strength
dissolves, so i rise again
so you sink down again into the dream
my dream
for the roles are now reversed
and i am your mother
you my child

only midway
when we are equally heavy, in half-sleep
when we are weightless
do the dream mingle.
there you are my lover
and my beloved. there
we are born

as we brush lightly.

6 comments:

Marta said...

This is magnificient Swiss, where do I find more information about nordbrand? Or, can you give me some?

swiss said...

material on nordbrandt on the web is annoyingly sporadic given that he's such a beautiful poet bu there's some poems and a bio here

http://denmark.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=432&x=1

i'll stick a couple more up later, can't remember what i've posted previously though there are some earlier in the blog. there seems to be more of his work available in translation these days which is lovely. i have a copy of dream bridges in dutch!

i can't understand why he's not more widely spoken about. my impression is that thise who like him do so fiercely

swiss said...

actually, that's not so true any more. have just happened upon curbstone press (whose motto appears to be 'poetry like bread is for everyone'!!) who puiblish a number of his books, including the rather fabulous 'selected poems'. all of these are now definitely on my christmans list!

Marta said...

Oh! be reassured, they will be on my list too!

Thanks for the web site, and for connecting me with such an imaginific author :)

Andrew Shields said...

Thom Satterlee's translations of Nordbrandt ("The Hangman's Lament") were published by Green Integer. A lovely book.

swiss said...

i enjoyed hangman's lament but selected poems for me is the collection that really got me into nordbrandt