Four Poems from Sweden

Every time we lay claim to something, we fall into the yarns of loss. Don’t let the pretense of ownership run away with you. Weak parts, like arms and legs, can so easily disappear. It just takes the heart rising out of the ribcage for death to open her only wing and sweep it toward her.

* * *

Death makes me clumsier than usual and I spill my blood out onto the floor and must wipe up all the little fernlike stains sticking to my feet like stamps. She has shown herself yet again, overgrown with bumps and scales and I fill the house with winter apples as if for a funeral, furnishing a storehouse for the mourning.

* * *

Now, everything is pruned. Not by shears, but by death, who climbed around my body for so long I thought she was looking for a place to rest, to stake her tent down into flesh. Prickmarks everywhere from branches sharpened into arrows or pens. She never made camp here. She cut out windows and weighed them in her hand like you weigh siblings and find them to be twins of equal weight and value.

* * *

There are questions so delicate they cannot be asked. I’ve carried the buttercup-guilt for so long. How unintentionally and eagerly I pulled the little ones out of the ground so they could never return. The shovels want to cut the questions off at the root, but they grow out on the other side, organically.

Translations from the Swedish