From The Horse Eaters (Hestæderne, 2010) Poem by Thomas Boberg

Hands that clench into fists around the pure air
and dance on the dirty wall in the light from the halogen lamp
and resemble childhood that bizarre valley
hands that recreate when you least expect it
I who stood suddenly on the mountain with
antlers caught in gigantic fluttering sheets
that's what hands can do for me when I
least expect it and the sheets dance across
my childhood's mountains when later on I left the
bizarre valley I had to return to it in my beds
and reunite with figures from the valley of rock and moss
and wax and clothes-lines and yellow houses and fluttering
white sheets that descend from the skies and land on
the long trains puffing through the mountain's black
tunnels and out into the adult valleys where much later I
walked about inflamed with a wild discontent for not
having seen my project through to its end and get drunk
once and for all until I came to the next valley
that was supposed to close the gap behind you why can't you
always say that you don't feel up to the tensed up lips
that keep nipping at your ears even though they are
gone your friends and the mountains too appear to be dead
insofar as they no longer remember you or in any case
died for he who moves about on the last side of the
electric fence that separates you from the
valley where you left your mother being of two disastrous minds
because you didn't understand how something really was
because you couldn't say anything else I said and wash my
rugged hands in the pink soap you buy here
with us where the vaccine for horse disease has long since
expired and people have actually started dying like horseflies
you damn well have other things on your mind but suddenly
your hands start looking for themselves in bizarre
patterns on the dirty wall in the light from the halogen lamp
your memories are copulating ghosts love your mother.

Translated from the Danish by Morten Høi Jensen