local_library November Has Fallen

by Michael Nyhaga

Published in Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

I know that we will die. Bow forward and notes: Red.

 

November has fallen. The days short like wooden gods on a shelf. But the road is

long, between the fountain and the steps.

The boat is rocking out in another darkness. Fish ridges are forming streaks in the surface.

Swirls of flowing water.

 

My work on the cemetery anchored me in the gravel paths, broom, meadowsweet and elder.

You were underground, hoisted a yellow flag. I cleaned the tombstones. The bones

we dug up was small.

In the crematorium the dead sat up when they were burned.

There is air in our lungs, they shouted and rose.

 

Is not that much to tell. You left a letter, the handwriting unclear

because death was in a hurry. I could not understand,

you never can, that everything proceeded. The trees grew, the store was full of

goods and people.

I sat on a bedspread with your crazy patchwork.

Tried to grimace. It did not work.

 

Why can not God make the stone, the stone that He can not lift.

1969. It was still summer when we went over to the atomic

time counting. It was impossible to deduce the celestial bodies and the light. Compare

our own time with the other, which is larger.

 

Lampreys swim in the creek. Little iceflakes, not going somewhere. We

defeated the stone bridge a long time ago, when we were little. Leaning over the railing you said that the fishes also could reflect themselves, but from the other side. They

coiled away like gray snakes beneath us, they didn’t care.

 

I walk past the stream, the murmurs. Thinking that it is nice with the

air, feel how it is to breathe. You stand up there in the doorway. How is it

possible at all, you’re dead.

You look like the picture in the newspaper, as if caught in time without coming

loose. I continue to walk. Gravel grains rises and falls rhythmically.

 

 

————-

 

 

Coincidences. The smell of moldy jute, decaying basements. On the

Dadaist reading your sister proclaimed: black, black, black, black.

Unfolded a piece of paper with a yellow dot on. Your sister always danced with her hips first, as if she sucked me in. It had felt very uncomfortable if you had not stood by and watched.

 

A voice of one crying in the night. The aspen leaves solidify in the middle of a movement. The fishes lower their heads and it’s as if the mosquitoes cannot cope anymore. The bridge squeaks in the almost imperceptible wind when something big, dark, passes by in

the water.

 

And the clouds return, as the seagulls following the fishing boat. The sound of the left wheel still reaches here.

A single stone left to throw.

Take the flattest, which will make the loudest sound and sink slowly.

 

 

————

 

 

All the sounds when she sleeps. All the sounds she produces. That she constantly surrounds herself with sound. The purple-colored sand rests. The moss no longer sucks up water to the green haze. The unconscious chanting, being outside myself. Balances, leaning over the edge.

I might as well.

 

The ghost of electricity hunts through the house. Into the kitchen, sighing in the walls.

What a disobedient spirit, she says. We have repaired the panel but

it constantly finds new ways to get in.

 

It’s just routine. Solidified resin, fool’s gold.

I have not changed anything, she says. But you disintegrate, crumble down

with the smell of old leaves.

 

Still visible is the water that remains the same. The waves do not move

forward, they roll back to their beginning. The boat certainly seems to take off, but the one who looks closely discovers that it is a ferry: It moves

back and forth between two points.

 

It’s a dog’s life, for sure. In the daytime we vibrate with a

forced, luminescent, voltage. At night we go to sleep under the hay-smelling

quilt, my face to her back. Darkness washes away our weight.

 

 

————–

 

 

 

Awakens from a natural dream. The self is hanging in its string. The gatekeepers of sleep wrap their cloak tightly around the body. It’s cold. Somewhere a window is

open, a flagpole rope turns in the wind.

A light approaching down the avenue. A car or even a human.

 

 

Dust bound by the rain. The sky gray clouds threaten with thunderstorms. Slowly slowly

it begins to drip again.

I repeat myself, my lyrics have become wet by rain.

 

 

A dog stood up in the woods yesterday. An intense light beamed from it,

almost self-evident. I was knocked to the ground by it, squinted, trying to find

Polaris. Paved my way with my hands, opened sedge tussocks.

There was it was suddenly, the path.

 

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Michael Nyhaga is a Swedish author and journalist who previously has written essays for Sweden's largest newspapers, such as Dagens Nyheter, as well as a book on contemporary Swedish philosophy and some novellas and short stories, both as books and for literary magazines. Michael also writes poetry, but hasn't had that kind of work published yet. He's been living in Sweden all his life.