Tomas Mikael Bäck: Three Poems

Tomas Mikael Bäck (b. 1946) is a Finland-Swedish poet of almost haiku-like concision, noting the passing details of outer reality as they merge with inner emotions and perceptions. Although the central preoccupations of his poems are intellectual and ethical, the world of everyday objects and incidents is never far away. Music and images hover in the background, yet are unobtrusive, and inform the ear and the eye as remembered or suddenly perceived stimuli. Bäck has published 16 collections: the poems here are from Memoarer och annan dikt (Memoirs and other poems), Schildts, 1997.

*

Why did so many buses go
To Kyyjärvi of all places,
when I was young?
Why did the sun-drowned March firmament
thrill to Schumann’s Lied
Ich wandre nicht,
smoothly captured in the morning
on my tape?
Why could nothing,
not even for a moment,
really shake me
from the sense of being outside,
from the belief that there is no direction,
that existence remains enigmatic?

*

Our story was doomed to end with a crash.
I suppose it was like you said: we'd already caused each other
too much pain. But there is something
offensive in the very staging
of the break-up.
You turn round on the way out, bid a last farewell,
and then pass through the hospital gates. You have a sense of reality,
of course you will manage. I still wonder
through what moods you walked back that day,
towards the city’s silent afternoon alarm! Sorrow – or
just relief? In my bare room voices must
recapitulate.

*

Our last excursion à deux:
he is already speechless. By train
to Tavastehus. There is nothing to say!
It is a sparkling winter’s day, sun gleams.
Don't want to eat, don’t want to see the Sibelius Museum.
I talk anxiety, talk sorrow.
Then sevenths, souvenirs are bought: Clifford
Brown, Sarah Vaughan. Home exists, though, the sound
of flight. What sun?
The orbit is defined
by an unknown heavenly body.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff