Pop Up Poetry by Niels Frank in Rachel’s Blog
It’s really so simple
—simple simple simple:
the small world can’t see the wider one
until you call to it
and after that it can only see itself.
After that everything is an “inner world.”
After that everything “inner” is pure blindness
pure ignorance
a world suspended by sewing thread between heaven and earth
but without the least bit of heaven
without the least lumpy bit of earth.
If I’m to interpret your call
(but should I really?)
it says something like: what on earth do you believe in
now that you don’t believe in God?
Okay. I believe that the inner world
is not the innermost world.
It is not a place or a vacant lot
a pastel-colored back room of consciousness.
It’s sooner a whisper and a whiffle
almost as if falling snow had acquired a sound.
The whisper says something about the outer world
I think
that it never could have told itself.
It can make the outer world harden
make all sounds stop
without disappearing
so that noise from cars and machine rooms and planes taking off
millions of thin notes and voices in all languages
babies’ wailing and trees being felled in a tropical forest
the smackings of intercourse
at once freeze in the air
in a huge clinking OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
In the ice-clear picture I may then see God
as an unbelievably beautiful
polymorphous
glittering
constantly shimmering pattern
though it’s hard for me to believe.
In the picture you and I are reunited “after all these years”
though I can’t believe that either.
It’s too good to be true. Or too true
to be good.
But
THEN WHAT?
Then I begin believing in the good life
though perhaps it too is much too good.
But the most important thing is not to live it
the most important thing goddammit is to believe in it.
Live in accordance with it.
The rest of the time you can count your coins
as if some fate were written in them
not as an unseen decree
or a decree in the unseen
but as the story you continually tell about yourself
which changes at each street corner
each kiss
but always ends with the same five words:
that’s the way it goes.
Niels Frank
translated from the Danish by Roger Greenwald
Picture World
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