PAEONIA (L. fem.) Poem by Fredrik Nyberg

The date belongs to the photograph
Roland Barthes


Dates, seasons;
a pair of slow residential streets
with peonies and parking lots.
You are very quiet.
Wheat can never become rye.
The medicine lies so still there on the kitchen table.
Your breathing results in a new (and different) breathing.






It is winter in the air and in the lungs.
When Linnæus closes his eyes, the world sleeps.
In a recurring sequence—which is more like a thought than a
dream—I live parallel, completely adjacent to myself. At night I
stand still in the darkness in the courtyard for a long while and look into my own
darkened apartment. Nothing moves. The room appears
unusually square, a desk, an unmade bed, a low
bookshelf full of periodicals. During that entire fall (the fall and
winter 1995) I often fell asleep on the parquet floor. Rye can never
become barley. Barley can never become oat.

Translated from Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida