The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

[p. 186]

Poems by Stefan Hertmans

Stevens on Sunday

6

It was difficult to sing in face of the object...

The singer and the architect
they never fully agreed:
should they inhabit a lyre
or a house of tones much higher?

All that's true becomes,
in its other half, all
that's heavy and decays.

We know that the singer dies,
tired by the twists in the road,
animals no longer on the road

from living to an image.
But the builder works in silence.
Stacking brick on top of brick.

He whistles through his teeth.
The song, he says, that is
for when the roof's complete.

He spits into his hands.
And on the brook, in the garden,
floats all at once a lyre.

It gets caught there on
a lump of stone.

The builder's just stopped for lunch
and the clouds are made of foam.

The cracks in the stone start singing.
What's measured goes to ruin.

From Music for the Crossing (Muziek voor de overtocht, 1994)
Translated by Gregory Ball.

Late Forms

We only saw that one cloud,
like nothing else there's ever been,
suddenly appear, like a funnel above the hill
umbilical pink and deep purple, veined and hollow,
a vat full of evening wind and menace,
possibly kilometres wide,
a gigantic oyster floating in the tide.

Could I, from such a distance, see the spot
where you and I, years back, lay
tangled on a wooden bench, in springtime wind
and bright white light, blowing young leaf,
fantastic shapes, a wooded path that
leads blind towards a face;
perhaps even then, for a moment,
I could have seen
the cloud appear
in your dreamlike depths;

because nothing betrays an old intensity
so much as silence and vanishment away.

From Annunciations (Annunciaties, 1997)
Translated by Gregory Ball.

Stefan Hertmans (1951-) (Photo by David Samyn).