Maybe

I should put my life

in boxes

It has gotten in over my head

Maybe

I should interpret Kuan Yin's advice thus;

the boxes stacked tight like quanta of life,

diaries in a moving van

I'm done with this life,

in the voice of Lucien Stryk's rendering

of the Chinese Death Poems

There's a division that Kuan Yin refers to,

between sudden sexual desire

and a love far beyond that,

'tween remote farm life and this city retreat

I hear a passenger jet shaking its shoulders

down the runway at Skavsta Airport,

up the skies, disappearing into the clouds

of my local silence

I place a towel underneath my chin

and sip a mug of strong, black coffee,

lying on my back

with too much unread

across these floor-to-ceiling bookshelves,

& these stacks by my bed

Done with this life

But there is a clarity

about all that;

a sweet nothing

I can satisfy my curiosity

with just a few letters,

hissing and burping

like Jaap Blonk

on the World Stage,

stars trembling

through the uncleanliness

of the atmosphere we keep breathing;

Stockhausen laid to rest

in his self-designed grave in Kürten,

copies of his massive oeuvre stored in caches

on all continents but Antarctica

I recall his sweaty hand

in the shake after KONTAKTE,

Stockhausen yelling to his assistant

Bryan J. Wolf:

”Play it again! I'm going home!”,

and his boyish appearance

a few years earlier

in the rest room space downstairs

in the German Embassy in Stockholm

before the mirror,

combing back his thin hair

before returning up the stairs with me

for dinner at the Polar Prize gathering;

a little German boy,

his eyes growing big & round in disbelief

in the bouts of surprise he sometimes suffered

at his state of celebrity,

grabbing him by neck and throat,

rubbing him against his own self-image,

grand and dubious

Aah, magnetic tape

represents a romantic age,

capstan, erase heads and copy effects all

But as of now (gone before you note it)

I'm done with this life,

diaries written, read, recorded and stored,

the books swarming with letters and words,

the body still at my service,

workmates reminiscing at Lisa Lidgren's vernissage