The Journey’s Formulas

_{from the Balkans—1955}

I

A murmur of voices behind the plowman.
He doesn’t look around. Empty fields.
A murmur of voices behind the plowman.
One by one the shadows break free
and plunge into the summer sky abyss.

II

Four oxen pass beneath the sky.
Nothing proud in them. And the dust thick
as wool. The insects’ pens scraping.

A swarm of horses, gaunt as those
in gray allegories of the plague.
Nothing gentle in them. And the sun whirls.

III

The barn-scented village with its scrawny dogs.
The Party official in the market square
in the barn-scented village with white houses.

His sky follows him: it is high
and narrow like the inside of a minaret.
The wing-dragging village on the mountainside.

IV

An old house has shot itself in the head.
Two boys kick a ball at dusk.
A swarm of quick echoes. All of a sudden, star-clear.

V

On the road in the long darkness. Stubbornly
my wristwatch shines with time’s captive insect.

The crowded compartment is dense with stillness.
In the darkness, the meadows stream past.

But the writer is halfway into his image
and travels there, at once mole and eagle.

From Hemligheter på vägen (Secrets on the Way), 1958