carl rakosi

Fluteplayers from Finmarken

How keen the nights were,
Svensen.
Not a star out,
not a beat of emotion
in the humming snowhull.
(Now and then an awful swandive).

It seemed ordained then that
my feet slip on the seal bones
and my head come down suddenly
over a simple rock-cistvaen,
grief-stricken and archwise.
Thereon were stamped
the figures of the noble women
I had followed with my closed
eyes
out to the central blubber
of the waters.

(There is not a pigeon
or a bee in sight.
My eyes are shut now,
and my pulse dead as a rock).

The Swedish mate says he recalls
this fungoid program of the mind
and matter,
where the abstract signals to the
abstract,
and the mind directs the final
white lens
on the spewing of the waterworm
and the wings of the midsea.

It was not clear what I was after
in this stunted flora
and husky worldcold
until the other flutes arrived:
four masters musing
from one polar qualm to another.