Wednesday 4 September 2013

A postcard from Norrköping

















(Such utterances
are of no help
to the stranger
lost in Norrköping.)

Sometimes I dream I’m a body
with no body attached.
However many times they show me my non-
existent lover’s smile I am inconsolable.

The child ate sugar
from a spoon.
The stranger lost in Norrköping
took no sugar in coffee or tea.

My lover gazes at the frozen sky.
She gives my hands a friendly squeeze.
“It’s a star raw night,
let’s go indoors.”

My lover runs to catch the bus to work.
Years ago she sent me a postcard
from Norrköping in whch she described
the cactus plantation in Carl Johans Park

& her encounter with a stranger
hopelessly, irremediably,
lost. I’ve been dead so long she maybe
thinks of me now & again, or

never - we were never close:
just that one night,
star raw,
frozen out of time. 

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