Poems - 2

By Morten Øen


Too close to the sun one evening as though it is immortal we are
ruin’s attractions, unstoppable like the past, a
lacking call for mercy, or on inborn frequencies of
skill; diverging and processed by others, shaped like
metal, lacking ardour of life or death

*

tears hearts in sleep
in realities’ attack of intimacy, the spread of city darkness, the steel
of buildings

…circle and you are out of position. That fundamental vagueness you
explain yourself with, this you have me in

*
I am not the lover you asked for, that remorse-light gaze
through the winter mirror of the city light, or softer cries muted year
by year

but like the darkness I yearn into you, gather and
sink just as continuously as ill-timed. As elaborate as
the difference between born and dead.

*
A blue jug filled with water against the light’s heat…
movement in the book’s shoulder
an outline in your breasts, you who are reading, what do you read in this, you
who are her, are you not here

Then you write yourself in all the same
Then we write ourselves in
Then we write ourselves in equally

and it is summer

you consider yourself a visionary
you consider yourself

a different form. A life no one has anything against, that doesn’t arise
without further ado

and why this now, so precarious
why these deficiencies in a mirror for eyes

there is something of us here, and in order to confuse
I shut you out

there are songs for lost and lonely. Nothing
forsaken is forsaken

translated from Norwegian by David McDuff

Poems - 1