Inger Christensen

love exists, love exists

your hand a baby bird so obliviously tucked

into mine, and death impossible to remember,

impossible to remember how inalienable

life,

as if the hydrogen

at the stars’ cores

turned white here on earth

your brain can

feel white

as if someone had

pleated up time

pushed it in

through the door of

a room

where a table

two chairs and the unused

bed of the non-sleeper

crumble

in advance

as if haze from

alien space

travelled like angels

you sit

in your corner

until without any-

thing definite happening

you suddenly

get up

and go

like a bird that

invisibly wakens

and feeds its

unborn young

at midnight

when no one can

know whether things

as they are

go on

it’s new for me

to be hearing cicadas

here where it’s cold

and so there are none

perhaps it’s the kind

of thing that’s always happened

when the light travels north

and the birches go along

limits exist, streets, oblivion
and grass and gourds and goats and gorse,
eagerness exists, given limits
branches exist, wind lifting them exists,
and the lone drawing made by the branches
of the tree called an oak tree exists,
of the tree called an ash tree, a birch tree,
a cedar tree, the drawing repeated
in the gravel garden path;

5

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future