by Pia Tafdrup
My
grey cat vanishes,
or
has it acquired a new life
at Nivå Brickworks?
At
night I hear it calling…
Search
for it, search again the next day.
Live
in a vacuum, while my father
looks
for another farm,
but
learn in sun and dust to cycle,
shoot
myself forward like a mainspring,
ever further out
on
Vibevej, along the residential gardens.
Lilacs,
laburnums,
an
olfactory orgy to sweep past.
Shall
I vanish like the cat,
for
there is no one to play with,
and over the summer
I
lose
tooth after tooth in my hollowed hand.
When
my mother takes an afternoon nap
with
no hands on the clock
the
first one falls out,
white,
but
leaving
a bloody hole
the
tongue’s tip wants to drill down into
–
instead of calling, speaking.
Taste
of iron in the mouth. Blood words.
Cave
language. Tongue pit.
A
tooth
white
as
a daisy growing in the grass
in
the garden of the house we rent
and under whose roof my mother in the rain
now
and then sings
"Solitude Road".
In
the house with creaky stairs
and
smells of strangers
there is a studio
we
may not enter, my sister and I,
there I seek refuge –
sit
for hours on the floor, contemplate
the
radiant pictures’
vanishing grey.
translated from Danish by David McDuff
