(The Best of the Achaeans)
Everyday in Jumbleorium, XXXVI
Reading Gregory Nagy's
“The Best of the Achaeans”
early in the morning
down here in my southern retreat,
in a slightly anxious atmosphere,
I'm taken off the text by sudden flashes
of the past
The lady next door
- our bedrooms wall to wall -
is moving to a smaller apartment
across the yard,
and I'm a bit apprehensive
about who the new tenant will be;
silent like the lady who's left,
or loud and difficult
Then I recall my one and only visit
to that apartment,
some time in the early 1990s,
well before the lady
- who at the time was my young son's childminder -
moved in, when a young man lived there
My cat Izzi (1980 – 1994)
had climbed from my balcony
over to the neighboring balcony,
and slipped into the young guy's place
I knocked on his door
He hadn't even noticed Izzi in there,
but I crawled in under his bed,
and pulled her out
He was quite surprised, and I was releaved,
as was Izzi!
When Izzi died in 1994,
I was heartbroken
and could hardly work
The feeling of utter darkness lasted
a couple of months
This poem has been sitting on my wall
since then:
“Man säger att Izzi är död,
men jag vet inte...
Jag begravde henne i skogen,
men jag vet ändå inte:
Lägenheten är full av hennes medvetande:
det slickas tass bakom gardinen,
det lapas sol,
det slinks undan bakom soffan,
det väntas med stora ögon
vid matskålen
man säger att...
men jag vet inte...”
English:
“They say that Izzi is dead,
but I don't know...
I buried her in the forest,
but I still don't know:
The apartment is permeated with her consciousness:
Paws are licked behind the curtain,
sun is being basked at the window,
there is a slipping out of sight behind the sofa,
waiting is obvious with big eyes
by the food bowl
They say that...
but I don't know...”
Simultaneously, this lightly anxious morning,
I come to think about my old friend Jon
(Jonathan B. Ross)
from Texas,
whom I and my then wife Judy socialized a lot with
when we lived in Dallas,
as he worked at Ernie's Delicatessen,
where we used to buy our bread
He sent me and Judy numerous cassette tapes
with his own compositions
and fantastic soundscapes,
after Judy and I had moved to Sweden in 1979,
and came visiting us over here twice
in the 1980s,
going on canoe trips and forest hikes with us
I've never had so much lingual fun with anyone,
as with Jon;
our conversations were brilliantly witty,
having us roar with laughter
'til we could hardly breathe!
Later, after Judy and I divorced in 1985,
and she moved back to the USA,
and I had become a single father here in Sweden,
he brought his newly wedded wife Jon-Etta
and flew over to visit us,
in November 1993;
not the, weather-wise, best part of the year...
Then Judy died, in 2009,
and I lost contact with Jon,
until the other day, after I got his email address,
he replied,
out of Duncanville, south of Dallas,
and flakes of life started falling around me,
with reflections stirring out of past situations
Simultaneously, in bed this morning,
surrounded by books, records, photographs
from earlier days,
I become aware of the emptiness of all this;
that none of this has any durability;
that any hardcore interest in those items
has worn off
and left my body as an object,
held down by gravity and lifted by anxiety
All of these items will surely burn
in a waste dump,
as surely as I will flicker for a few minutes
in the heatwave of cremation
I can go on reading Homeric texts,
but my eventual insights will not be spared
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
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Written on 2024-05-08 at 12:09
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Lawrence Beck |