Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Hedin & the author

RETIRED PRIVATE DETECTIVE

He could hear this sound deep inside himself, a munching sound, like someone gnawing on a leg bone. He suspects his ex-wife, then his neighbor. A few months later he begins to limp. Maybe the limp was planted there. He moves to another city, changes his name. He can still hear the munching. He grows older. He grows shorter. He suspects everyone. People die and leave him trinkets in their wills. Other parts of him go limp. He loses his hair. He investigates himself. Each morning he wakes to a silvery plane buzzing out of the sun, dropping breakfast in his mouth without spilling.

OSIRIS 64

A BEAUTIFUL OVAL

My voice is quiet, with a single bird
as its companion, somewhere in the tree,
here in the wind, altogether lost
in the forest with the dreams of oaks
and beetles, bark and wounded cedars.

And here one sees the silence the moon
sinks into its caves and craters,
its gouged-out skin with a reptile’s surface
and its jagged edge of a file flaring
like flint, the stone that brings fire.

Then the voice takes off with the bird, ogling
the moon, a beautiful disc with painted eyes.

OSIRIS 64

Winter Oasis

It is snowing violently behind my eyes

as I try to sleep,

out there the dancing prairie falcon

is pressed into the ground,

the bright hawk

flamboyant as a kite in the sun

turns raven against the clouds

and the solitaire, a grey ghost

peers through the French windows to see me pass

and does not, and is at his most alone.

It is snowing behind my eyes

with more determination

than the snow shows outside: a childhood toy

glass ball filled with a city drowned in flakes.

The mountains sleep fiercely behind clouds

we wait for their liberation with impatience.

Soon, I will go down into the arroyo

lined with tall piñons where the owl

threads his secret way when I wake him.

I will be more asleep than I ever am

enclosed in the moving walls of dream

before the moments fall again, one after one,

glinting in sunlight, each one like a knife.

Osiris 22, 1986

Nous ne connaîtrons jamais leurs noms.

For the mind, the spirit, the soul of the world.

Il fait un rêve…

Il fait un rêve d’olive noire. 

Tombé au pied de l’arbre porteur, pressentant le désert 

avant d’en effleurer le sable, sa peau se ride. L’absence 

du regard de ses semblables le colore, et sa forme

qui roule s’arrondit lorsqu’elle s’épuise.

Cette nuit, la frayeur crée le noyau.

Osiris 101, 2025

Translated from the German by Gerald Chapple

INCIDENT

The very moment
I opened the book
the letters buzzed
up and away: leaving me
with beautifully bound oblivion

Bending speechless over blank
pages of history I
no longer knew
what was what is
who I am
can be want to be
will be

Agitated scribes
leapt around with giant nets
brought me their catch
then shook the tired remnants
back into their proper places.

Osiris 68, 2009

Elegy 3

Finally at four in the morning

silence comes. A long time on the way

from its forgotten source

and almost unexpected.

For a moment in the grey of dawn

you’re overwhelmed by its mercy.

Osiris 89, 2019

THE BOOK OF IOWA

When sleep is tiny
as a petal on a flower of whiskey

I climb out of bed, listen
to you digging a cold space
under the crows and cities of corn,

apartment-fields out past the windy clothesline

where my mother’s albino
nightgown is lurking.

Osiris 68, 2009