Lars Gustafsson
(1936-2016)
After rain
Summer rain's sky like an X-ray film
where light and shadows mingling show through.
Silent forest and not a single bird.
Your own eye like a droplet spilled under clouds,
reflecting the world: light and vague shadows.
And suddenly you know who you are:
a baffled stranger between soul and clouds,
only by the thin membrane of an image
are the world's depth and the eye's darkness kept separate.
Lars Gustafsson (1936-2016)
On the Deepest Sounds
A stop exists in large organs,
a thirty-two-foot bass, contra-fagotto
mighty thrumming air column, late autumn
when in the wells the water rises
the subterranean mesh of streams and wells.
And it is more ache than sound.
At this lower limit where music ends
something else wishes to begin,
more body than sound, body and darkness,
and late autumn when the wells rise,
but since it is under the ground,
under the music, under the lament
— it does not wish to begin, does not begin
and therefore does not exist.
Now it is nearer, now it is plain!
Now it is straightway heard throughout the expanse.
