Hugo Claus
Even Now
from Registration [1948]
For the Poet Antonin Artaud
Among us, the strays, the strangers,
the ones who never landed, the deranged,
a pale captain has died.
I see the arteries in his temples
no longer throbbing.
His face, a carved paving stone,
has finally stopped moving.
That we are scarred for life
is clear to them, the balanced souls,
the undisturbed characters,
in all their level hours.
They broke his fragile back.
They locked him up with a chair and bread and straw.
They called him mad and sick.
They pitied him.
I will meet him still
under bridges, in the empty train station.
He will put his arm around my shoulder.
Towards morning he starts drilling,
shaking my fibres,
until I scream, Artaud, Artaud.
I see the arteries in his temples
no longer throbbing.
Break the belt of impotence.
Crack the shell of infertility.
My dead greyhound, my ravaged tower,
my bleeding, stillborn,
burnt-out man, Antonin Artaud.
from Without Due Process [1950]
I
We’ve known it now for centuries,
that the moon is dangling by a thread
attached to heaven, hell or nothing at all.
That the thick blue paint of night
is drooping down into the streets
to wrap around you like a deep blue robe
this evening when you head for home,
dawdling ne’er-do-wells, theatre and recital-goers,
nighthawks, people who are alive,
and that the night will soon be washed away
like cheap blue ink from years ago
and afterwards the pale, pink skin
of heaven, hell or nothing at all
will shine through and no longer pale,
especially not the pink nothing like a girl’s
soft and salty sex,
and afterwards heaven and hell and nothing at all
will dry out, go mouldy and decay,
just as old loves and bad habits,
doses of the clap, faithful pieces of furniture
and bunkers from pre-1914 must die,
with no one’s help, in a corner, on a sandstone slab,
like cunning old crabs must die.
III
In autumn and in wet winters
there are days when nothing happens
in the house. Nothing except breaking the past,
like breaking a day that’s passed in glass,
like melting chunks of pond ice,
so that its number’s up, the past’s, its number is up.
But the past and today just won’t lie down,
they turn circles on a carousel, joining hands,
becoming weeks again and months and finally seasons.
There are days
that the clocks of every tower in the land
run half an hour slow
and not one of those winter people notices,
and the lost half hours, saved by no one,
ride through villages and towns, unseen, behind trams
and horse-drawn carts and clump together to form a day,
the way that snow makes a man of ice,
a day of ice for the lonely,
for whom every night is holy
like tonight.
from The Joyous and Unforeseen Week [1950]
1
It can rain and it can blow,
but the magpie still speaks on Sunday,
the day of dogs and the blind.
Oh, Sun-sham-day.
To the wooden priest in his box
I whisper, For me, defused, deactivated,
deadened, despairing,
this day is no valid reason.
4
Beside the water where the grass grows
like the hair of dead women
the girls lie on Friday nights,
surprising passers-by with a glimpse
of thighs in stockings with a sailor
in between.
Unshakeable confidence
steals up on you then, oh, Freya-day stroller,
you wide-branching bridegroom.
from Bounds [1955]
Home
Father was eating partridge and Mother wasn’t there
and me and Joris were talking murder
and fleeing and which trains to take
when the sun rolled into the loft
and lay there shining in the hay.
Father cursed and said, God sees me.
Joris fled
and I kept playing with the trains
which ran across the floor
on electricity.
from A House Between Night and Morning [1953]
Exercises
7
Tonight, the whatever of May, at nine p.m.,
On the dirt road past the young and rustling corn,
In the froth of the summer rain,
I was misfortunate enough to think of you.
I thought:
If you’re gone, if you desert,
If you want to be dead to me,
If you want to cower in the brothel of forgetfulness
With your arms over your head,
If you want to walk off unnoticed from one day into the next,
If you want to play with memory’s pearls,
Tying memory around your neck like a wreath.
I thought:
Where will be the grace in life’s bird cry,
Where will be the grace in day after day of
Swollen sickening time?
Gistel By Bruges
Village of cows and willows,
Church tower and rhododendrons in rows.
In a curtain of rain
In a fold of the sky and in the light,
The bronze mayor sits on a bronze box.
Moss from the palm of your hand,
Rain from the whites of your eyes,
Hedge tops from your lashes,
Hills of ochre from your breast,
And the folds of the whole country from your body.
And the ringed bulls bellow
Through the circle of hay to the open fields,
But the nearby cows don’t make a sound.
A Rendezvous
Again you say, Bye and Goodnight,
Words that come at me with the crooked gait
Of the tortoise in the kitchen.
The fourteen monkeys in the garden
Cower under the rhubarb leaves,
Huddling together to weep in the rain.
The wire that clangs against the smoke-stained walls
When the wind gets up.
The last cigarette. The smoke. The ash.
We have got 30 years left to live
And then centuries.
The lift starts up. The footsteps in the hall.
I tremble briefly. You’re caged in now
And won’t get past me again.
I Write You Down
My woman, my pagan altar,
Which I caress and play with fingers of light,
My young wood, my wintering place,
My tender, unchaste, neurasthenic sign,
I write your breath and body down
On lined music paper.
And in your ear I promise brand-new horoscopes,
Preparing you again for trips around the world
And a stay som
ewhere up on an alp.
But with gods and constellations,
Eternal happiness can grow deathly tired,
And I have no home, I have no bed,
Not even flowers for your birthday.
I write you down on paper
While you swell and bloom like an orchard in July.
Behind Bars
Saturday Sunday Monday sluggish week and weakened days
A still-life a landscape a portrait
A woman’s brows
Closing as I approach
The landscape with blond calves wading a river
Where the season of compassion is burnt
Into the Prussian blue of the fields
Then I painted another still-life
With unrecognisable brows and a mouth like a moon
With a spiral like a trumpet of redemption
An Angry Man
No house too black
For me to live in
No morning too bright
For me to wake up in
As in a bed
That’s how I live and watch in this house
Between night and morning
Walking on fields of nerves
And digging my nails into every
Uncomplaining body that approaches
Saying chaste words like
Rain and wind apple and bread
Dark and viscous blood of women
Caligula
Where later radishes and mignonette will flower
In May that is
In a garden by the tracks of a country train
The wind
Is freezing now in December
And in that wind without light without shepherds without birds
Without any chance at all a foal has frozen to death
I’ve brought it here and put it under glass
I gaze away the days and hours
(That pass me by on the wide path
Of this existence which reasonably
We tread in sin with no great deeds)
And wait until thankful and thawed
The foal looks up and speaks its first word.
from Tancredo Infrasonic [1952]
Las Hurdes
We know neither bread nor meat
We sleep on leaves that turn to compost for our stony land
Our houses have no windows
And in our village there are 14 dwarves and 30 idiots
It rains and our levees leak
It doesn’t rain We pray and our earth stays dry
Like our skin
Like our throats that swell and crack
He who is our father is our lover
And our mothers die young
Shame is our portion
Disgrace our daily meal
Our faces are rank with weeds
We look into your camera We are real
And you are right to say, “They are Las Hurdes.”
West Flanders
A gaunt song a dark thread
Land like a sheet
That sinks
Springtime land of milk and farms
Willow-wood children
Feverish summer land when the sun
Spawns its young in the corn
Golden enclosure
With the deaf-and-dumb farmers at their dead hearths
Praying to God to “forgive us
His trespasses against us”
With the fisherman burning in their boats
With the mottled animals the frothing women
Who sink
Land I dawn in you My eyes are shards
I am in Ithaca with holes in my skin
I borrow your air when I speak
Your bushes and lindens concealed in my words
My letters are West Flanders: dune and polder
I drown in you
Land you are a gong in my skull and at times
Later in ports
A conch: May and beetle Dark bright
Earth.
Bye
A morning like always your house is empty
We count and one by one the days
Step into the cage
One sees I see you see
The hidden animals in the cool mirror see
This keeps it buried
The knife that rusts the blood that clots
The bricks porous the milk sour
One says you say
With a blinded voice a frozen gesture
Bye
Bye dear children bye.
from The Oostakker Poems [1955]
Bitter tastes
Bitter tastes the herb of memory.
Artillery, chunks of phosphorus,
Chalky stubble turnips surround the house and who
Is not watching there, unchaste sentinels waiting for the sign
Of the burning bush, of the horn,
Of the helmeted weathercock of hate?
Sliding in on fingers,
Forcing entry into my resting blood. Living there swiftly,
Living there slowly. Until it burns in the hay of all words,
Until it burns in the bygone field, the drowned days and
Their fermenting corn.
The Singer
The singer is not free
But fast and scornful and skimming the peaks like a pond.
He is not free because his transfixed cascade
And worm-eaten wood resound in his throat, tongue and mouth.
Let loose in his skin, this house,
The singer greets neither cuckoo nor bird catcher
Nor the furtive watchers in the low country.
The singer is his song.
The Mother
There is no me, no me but in your earth.
When you cried out your skin shivered
And my bones caught fire.
(My mother, imprisoned in her skin,
Changes by the measure of the years.
Her eyes are pale, escaped from the urging
Of the years by looking at me and calling me
Her joyful son.
She was no bed of stone, no feverish beast,
Her joints were a litter of kittens,
But my skin stays unforgivable to her,
The crickets in my voice unmoving.
“You have outgrown me,” she says slowly,
Washing my father’s feet, then falling silent
Like a woman without a mouth.)
When your skin cried out my bones caught fire.
You laid me down, I can never bear this image again,
I was the welcome but murderous guest.
And now, in manhood, I am a stranger to you.
You see me approaching and you think, “He is
The summer, he shapes my flesh and keeps
The dogs in me alert.”
While you die on your feet every day, not with me,
Apart, there is no me, no me but in your earth.
Turning inside of me, your life is lost, you won’t
Come back to me, I cannot recover from you.
A Father
Dancing or defeated,
Imprisoned in human warmth, we are already slowing
In the thickets of disinclination, in the contaminated fields,
Following on the heels of the mutilated, who whisper.
Their lips dry in the sun, the late sun.
We hear the dusk, we hear
The daily rattle from the scaffold,
We hear the flayed cub, we hear
The Jew burning in the bush and the crippled nun,
The judge’s sisters, god-fearing and voluptuous,
The heathens in the park, the raven shooters and the crusaders.
We hear them all.
A beak eats out of our mouths.
A tropic encircles our blood.
And under the linden, dewy in its shade,
The father lies for days, days on end, unswayable,
Watching his worn-down children.
A Virgin
Between clouds and royal ferns
The mares will ride tonight in the white field
Growing whiter.
Between thorns and rhododendrons the farmers beat
The children who came too soon.
And where the black iron maiden
Subdues me
The tower shudders, the holy signs tremble.
Listen:
“I am the fatal mother, desire me,
implore me, awaken in my sun — I
Will be with you till your breath fails.”
Listen: “You will not heal but live
On the edge of my life.
In sand, you will acknowledge me.”
In a harbour
That breathes like a woman,
Not restlessly but endlessly,
Her body flutters,
And where she swells all buttons snap,
All skins peel.
Where she swells I surrender, foundering in her bucking
Boats, her rising triumph,
Her sinking, slackening, sailing inland sea.
A Woman
1
Hair roaring with laughter,
Seagull eyes, a pouch on her belly,
A mother or another traitor,
Who knows this scorching woman?