Tommi Parkko: The Pelican – Poems

Poems by Tommi Parkko
Translated by David McDuff

“So long as a man rides his hobby-horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?”

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

[2-6]

i

It was that time, the bear was lowered from the mouth of heaven,
a yellow helmet, on it a red cross and a bird,
the ropes went from the groin to the shoulders
from the tops of the trees deep into the stomach.

You were by the side of the highway, the land opened up before you its  shipwrecked tale:
asphalt and grass, a stone’s helplessness, a ploughed acidic field.

The stone was newborn, and the fontanelle,
the voice bounced on the bones of the skull, the mill ground
salt, in the grains of the wheat an abyss, an abyss for disputes and thundering.

On the road that led to the edge the elks and the birds confronted one another,
you saw it all and it was good,
stone and flesh intertwined  like milk round coffee,
you can isolate the limit! Your axis round everything,
the stars, the child’s skin smelt fresh.

ii

You have not been given your voice, you
and three others.
You were too late, the alarm clock stopped, the train left,
you read the book by chance, the round form,
the sounds had already been assigned.
Not good enough for you the noise,
the whir of the cypress or the swishings of the whale.

You have not received a voice
from anyone, no rattle
of tongue or creature
though you asked and asked.

Your friends took the boom of the thunder,
the tinkling of the waterfall and the cry of the pelican.

you listen your ears
hopeful, starry bright,
there is nothing yet:
do not turn your back on a world
that does not give you your voice.
.
iii

The police band accompanies two thousand
dachshunds into town, coffee pots drift on the tide
noses outstretched.
My illness is not a medicine, but one must dive into the river all the same.

I wait for the darkness that on my eyelids is like a paper margin,
the air’s victory over the land,
a  rainbow sucks the water of the river
to rain it down elsewhere. The word is mist and pouring rain in the library.
I wear out the wooden walls and the newspapers with my open eyes.
It is all from the sky, the frogs,
the slow steps of the ice to the airplane and
the programming that is called maturity.

[6]

And we talk about the light and the fog, we look at the forest.
(On the shore were the immense waves of  great ships.)
The beams of the stairs creak when we go up to the tower. We talk ever more
vigorously of how the wind has blown here,
what the weather is like.
The stones, we have completely forgotten them.

Did you know that when earthworms die the soil becomes poisonous?

Now it would be right
that you are the spring and the screwed-on sun
with worn threads,
and all the other important things.

The summer day remained unfinished, someone came.

[9]

In a city built inside a pot there is no dancing,
rise from pitch and molten lead, be a straight-backed saint.
The black steps rustle down to the shore, the ribs of the houses
melt into the river.

Old age is a habit rooted in the body, the icons bear the pure
colours of God.  The black and the grey are from man, from bone.
The other colours are from flowers, shield bugs and stones
The sky is perforated by urine, the snow by Tycho Brahe’s toenail.
In a city built inside a pot there is no dancing,
do not talk to me of Mary or of virgins. Your unicorn
is the beluga whale and the relics
are tsarist bonds and Kafka. You must threaten
the relics with fire and spike to have your will.

In the synagogue’s attic are the remains of a creature, and pigeons,
the city’s dream under the tourist map.
You will soon call the castle home, it is the backbone of everything.

[13]
i

We who live in the end times,
we lie on the river bed, the waves are breaking,
Robert Scott’s expedition
(the mules already eaten on the outward journey)
wanders around on your back,
optimistically,
the sun dams us up
on the bottom, the concrete is brutal water on bare skin,
the roof must be broken so that death may be easier.

ii

In the ice there are bubbles, mirrors,
lenses superimposed, overlapping and
crosswise. Red oozes
through my body, the light.

The flat-breasted ice, the skeleton in the tent.

This is ether day.
Ice become feeling, the even
light is distorted,
I sense the moon, but its glow
is in me.

(For the love of God, take care of our dear ones!)

iii

You are overwhelmed by the waves,
plunge ever deeper under your surface.
You expect rain but see a window in which lights are flashing.
Your name breaks in two
when I summon you on the threshold,
your family, that pool, remains outside.

[14]

The machine is silence:
I have not studied its moving parts
nor can I say anything about the  machine’s importance
but I acquired it.
The wasp doesn’t understand the window,
even though its legs are in the glass. It picks up speed
and leaps once more transparent,
a harsh wind machine, burnished
the air gives way.
The machine seeks under the scales of the pine cone
things that are half-made: a rib cage, new machines, drawings
of bridges, and a fully trained dog.
The rain is girls inviting
(I’m already so old)
to a game of boules. I also expect
that one of them will bring me inertia.

[19]

Of the trains and the immense
deeds in the borderlands I have
nothing to report, but of a nose, I overtake a sleigh
which has woodchips as its load, tar.
Soil and diesel,
my father is mending the tractor, removing the detachable parts,
I am leaving for the city.

after this he retired to rest, and it is most certain he was so little disquieted
as to fall into a sound sleep: for his breathing, which, on account of his corpulence,
was rather heavy and sonorous, was heard by the attendants.

A large nose has come to the city. The nose’s soldiers are meticulous.
They are killing at the border, at this moment
odours that cannot change into my memories, they are listening to
the empty rhetoric, finding heroes and deeds that fit them.

[22]

I have been promised a storm,
in the wind whistle flags and pennants, blue rhinoceroses
and crocodiles. En route
I see people, lions, eagles and quails,
bloody boards, geese, spiders,
silent fish that inhabit the waves
starfish from the sea, and creatures
invisible to the eye.

We follow the badly-painted banners
until they have faded into curtains.

You talk about crop patterns,
genuine and fake,
the union of geometry and falsehood.
This is the centre of people and animals,
the paths of identified voices.

You will pick out of this narrative whatever
is most important: for a letter is one thing, a history another; it is
one thing writing to a friend, another thing writing to the public.

The oceans and skies of numerous latitudes, or the roaming in search of weather
is your story
of the person for whom clouds are more important than fabrics,
you don’t get through the circles and patterns.

In these expanses outside the paper a muddy field,
a mathematical narrative, a wedge at the heart of things.

[35]

To you belong the columns, the rooftree
and the ideas carried down from  heaven, to me
the pilasters and ornaments.
From the burning victim you take the bones, the pelvis and the smoke,
the blood, flesh, cartilage and muscles are mine.
The fleshless corpses stand in position like a banana republic’s
armies in red-brick warehouses,
the columns are decaying into the park.
The smoke and ideas are in aluminum casks,
they ferment, soon the pressure is dangerously high.

[36]

I do not fear God, the sea, warships
fire, being thrown overboard in distress, large birds,
the inertia of princes, cities, or any man or matter,
reprisals and arrest do not scare me. My assurance
compensates for the losses, the risks, the bad luck,
the difficulties and all evil. But not even that can compensate
for the mean customs man and my not knowing what I want.

[39]

There is no longer anyone here, the border is
obsolete, like everywhere else
the boys come to the shore on their mopeds,,
the girls go rowing in a green boat, the ducks
do what they always do in spring,
their image remains on the water’s surface.
When the last child, bird and flower disappear, hope will too.
I sit on the beach,  think about the lapsed border,
the severed nerve-end, the house whose wall has fallen.
The riders come to the shore,
of the borders there is nothing to tell,
I blow all speech away.