Torild Wardenær
Torild Wardenær Poems
Field studies II
The seaward approach calm and without engines across green lakes with mountains that/ descend into the water and Jalapeño birds in flight over them - how can I explain this:
...
Perhaps we have slept our way through life
drifted like a sleepwalker from one love to the next
mumbled ourselves into the sovereign power of language
dreamt ourselves to the rim of realities
...
In writing I must have reversed the numbers and automatically and with a firm
hand I have written 3002 instead of 2003. I simply take this as a sign that it will
become true that we will be there together, on a April day a thousand years
in the future.
...
At any time at all I can be seized by a sudden madness of infinity and
also be possessed by all the lives that until now have been lost.
Possessed by the fact I myself have survived, by the days that consume lovers,
by the incessant listening to the body's red interior.
...
What is this, skin deficiency, horn deficiency, blood deficiency?
You walk upright, butt and butt, are pale and slashed and frenzied, for passing
through too quickly has been banned, death has been banned
...
It feels as if I had blue blood in my veins
I must belong to the aristocracy, I hunt foxes and hares
acquire land, hold court
take over the gallery and stand on my rights,
...
I live most graciously and magnificently, and at the turn of the year it is time for
presents - presents to Pater O, to Peter Pan, to mother, to the kind grand uncles and all
my friends, we will live for ever
...
Give me a P! Preferably Pluto with its moons of night and underworld, Charon,/ Nix and Hydra, and if everything goes according to plan, the New Horizon/ probe, which will arrive on a peaceful mission in 2015./
Give me an S! The Sombrero galaxy decorated with infrared light./
Give me an I! Isis and Osiris, Inanna and Dumuzi//
...
Towards Sagittarius, twenty-five thousand light years away, the young Pistol Star reels around its own detonated mass, a hundred and fifty times stronger than the sun, fully loaded, unsecured and out of the holster.
...
Torild Wardenær Biography
Torild Wardenær was born in 1951. She attended courses at the Srivekunst-akademiet in Hordaland in 1993-94, studied literature and art history at the Universities of Stavanger, Oslo and Bergen. From 2001-2004 she made her Master Degree in literature at the University of Bergen. She made her debut in 1994 with the collection of poems I pionértiden. So far she has published nine collections of poems, four dramas and two translations from English. She has also participated on a number of crossover-projects with different artists, musicians, actors and writers, as well as in national and international poetry festivals. Since 1999 she has been a guest teacher in Creative Writing Programmes at Norwegian Universities in Bergen, Bø, and Tromsø.)
The Best Poem Of Torild Wardenær
Inheritance CCCXXX, Field studies II
Field studies II
The seaward approach calm and without engines across green lakes with mountains that/ descend into the water and Jalapeño birds in flight over them - how can I explain this: every/ morning to get a new watermark when arriving at field I from field II, these areas not so/ dissimilar, but often this journeying between them describes some strange distances along/ the dark mountains, beneath the hunting birds and in this demotorised sailing trip from the/ particular exactness of sleep, an ecstasy that can only be measured in its own ecstasy and in/ the firm admission of the sin of the waking world and in the great initiations that have to be/ counted on every night - all this in the greatest intimacy and exactitude along with some/ outburst or other from animals or humans in distress or joy, the scraping of claws against an/ underlying surface, water in motion, the rattling of strange ceremonies and customs, the war/ in progress, the almost soundless cardinal fish, the whoosh of the closest fixed stars.//
What can I say about this simultaneity that blends with the sharp cries from the/
hunting Jalapeño birds?/
A moment of absolute pitch is unexpectedly granted me and naturally I seize/
the opportunity, identify the note precisely in the transition between field I and/ field II and say:/
‘That is a C sharp.'
English Translation by John Irons
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