Herman de Coninck Biography

What you do with time
is what a grandmother clock
does with it: strike twelve
and take its time doing it.
...

your sweaters & your white & red
scarves & your stockings & your panties
(made with love, said the commercial)
& your bras (there's poetry in
such things, especially when you wear them) -
they're scattered around in this poem
the way they are in your room.

come on in, reader, make yourself
comfortable, don't trip over the
syntax & kicked-off shoes, have a seat.

(meanwhile we kiss each other in this
sentence in brackets, that way
the reader won't see us.) what do you think of it,
this is a window to look at
reality, all that you see out there
exists, isn't it exactly
the way it is in a poem?
...

You never said anything. I always had to ask.
If you loved me. & you gave me a kiss.
If it was safe that first time,
& another kiss.
& a little later if I was doing it right
& a kiss, O.

You never said anything, always said it with your eyes.
Your eyes that stayed behind in your face
alone when I left you;
your eyes after crying:
you weren't there,
you looked at me like faraway places,
& I had to go there,

& once I had got that far,
the eyes that you used to say ‘darling',
looking to see if it didn't change
on its way to me.

& when you lay by the road in the meadow,
O what all hadn't you broken,
your legs, your ribs, your eyes, me.
You never said anything, always said it with your eyes,
the way you lay there dying,
eyeing,

& your eyes that your son has in now,
that he uses to say: don't go -
you never said anything, he says it, & you look at me.
...

We walk, the two of us, through the autumn day.
And in spring too I feel no different.
We walk through much brown tavern-brown of leaves
through much dark-red loss, appellation controlée,

that deepens in the cellar of the years.
We walk through the beiger-turning woods of Drente.
Hear the wind passing through the hennaed trees
sounding like an oboe, tramp among instruments.

33, and in the midst of the dark wood
of life. And with a sense of nowhere belonging,
at home in the woods and desolate at home.

Will we one day, maybe, ever?
The summer is past, the hay-making is over.
The here is nowhere, and the now is never.
...

I think that poetry is something like fingerprints
on the window behind which a child who can't sleep
stands waiting for dawn. Earth generates mist;

sorrow, a kind of sigh. Clouds
are responsible for twenty-five kinds of light.
They actually hold it back. Back lighting.

It's still too early to be now. But the rivers
are already leaving. They've heard the murmuring
from the silver factory of the sea.

Daughter beside me at the window. Loving her is
the easiest way to remember these things.
Birds hammer at the anvil of their call

all, all, all.
...