Philip Brady
An Introduction to Torild Wardener’s “The Drift of Days and Nights”
I FIRST MET Torild Wardener at Fundacion Valparaiso, a writers and artists colony on the coast of Andalusia in Spain. In fact, it was there in that brilliant swath of desert between the Mediterranean and the white cliffs of the town of Mojacar that Torild composed “The Drift of Days and Nights,” which Artful Dodge now has the privilege to offer to American readers. Though she and I spent a few languorous afternoons transposing her Norwegian into English, it wasn’t until a year later, when Torild sent me John Irons’ translations, that I saw laid out before me a landscape as magical as the Andalusian desert where these poems were conceived.
But the landscape of “The Drift of Days and Nights” is not one a tourist of Spain or Norway would recognize. Nor is it solely an internal landscape, a map of the mind at play, though it is that too. These poems instead explore the space where the sublunary and eternal touch. That sounds like rarefied air, but here it’s a recognizable, even intimate space, teeming with the quotidian and the cosmic: fennel, car mirrors and nebula. It is a stratum created from the aura of named things; no, not the aura; the fever, a vitality threatening to implode. Whether Wardener describes traffic in a city tunnel, or the contents of her refrigerator, or “toes that feel squeezed even in the best shoes,” always these poems spiral out from a force inside the enclosed space.
Their power derives not only from the plenitude of things seen and named, but from the reassortment of the great and small; the world shaken and reassembled slightly off the mark so that we almost see the fault lines. “All of it,” Wardener reminds us, is “caused by a friction, a movement which I begin.” But friction here does not sand the world down to the merely ironic; we are not asked to choose between alternative realities. Rather, “The Drift of Days and Nights” is just that; a permeation, a drift, a fabric made from striations of light and dark.
Much has been made of the question of form in prose poems; whether such a thing isn’t an oxymoron. These prose poems address that question; not directly; these are not reflexive or rhetorical pieces. But they address the question by revealing one source of poetic form: the need to make something that feels as liberating and as pressured as the life of a human form. With relaxed speed, in a voice that shifts from comic to elegiac, Wardener shows us that poetry is never a matter of scale, that its gift is to make us see Blake’s “eternity in a grain of sand, infinity in an hour.” Ultimately, the form of these poems derives from the tension they maintain; gracefully, elegantly; between poetry and prose, day and night, air and space, identity and anonymity, life and death. This is their form — though not perhaps immediately apprehended. It is a form that comes to us slowly, by accretion, and it asks more from us than our attention: it asks our participation, asks us to enter the inbetween-ness and feel the consequences of “the small movements [we] perform: a rolling of the neck, nails across a slightly shaky surface, the decision to add extra weight to the short day.”
This issue of Artful Dodge is the first I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in as Poetry Editor. I’m especially proud to facilitate Torild Wardener’s first appearance in print in the United States — grateful for the chance to revisit and share, in English, in Ohio, the inspiring landscapes of “The Drift of Days and Nights.”
—Youngstown, Ohio, December 21, 2000
Torild Wardener
Five pieces of advice, entered
I am cowardly but persevering — sometimes mutter that courage is the
prime virtue
1. Stay untamed and imitate good people’s actions
preen myself under cover of being human, scribble down notes
2. Have many slogans and let everything your eye falls on at any time be your
fresh young helper
prostrate myself before the great authorities; wind directions, masses of
snow, nights and days
3. Walk over the face of the earth, see the moon in all its drama, the towns
beneath, the attacks and retreats of nights and days
the rustling comes from the hardwood forests
4. Visit the gardens of the world
I’d prefer to go straight to paradise in a large-scale freight, but that’s
probably unlikely
5. Love the dangers of this world
so I’ll try as best I can to follow the five pieces of advice I’ve been given.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Opals
That her eyes are so light. Hm. I study them, they fill with water, I thought the iris became darker when this sort of thing happened; hers just become lighter, like opals, the bringer of woe, the precious stone for kings. Mouth red. Skin white. Her hands are trembling and her voice is weak. Eyes like opals. I drift off, to my astonishment I am unable to memorize the last thing that’s been said, I try to fix my gaze but it immediately starts to wander. Because of the opals I think of Australia and the bizarre animal life there and the lies told about the degenerate people.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Ill at ease, well at ease
Perhaps just make do with pictures of the lemon grove,
the nebula or Mars, for despite its declared mobility the body
always stays put in precisely the same place — on the verge of the world,
weighed down by nutrients, by self-inflicted exercises, afflicted by fever
and unassumingly circling around in its own region
bent over at first at the memory of stones, its own weight, its red scar
tissue
then upright: well-tempered with two taut achilles tendons, one eye
green, one brown
everything apparently beautifully symmetrical, in its inescapable order.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
I make a U-turn I
I like the small cartilage clicks my head makes when I let it do circles. I especially like the fact that no one else can hear them, but then again, there are plenty of other sounds to derive pleasure from: the effective creaking when the plastic steering wheel in the car is swung to the right or left, the clink my boxes make when they are opened and shut time after time producing a full, short, sharp and at the same time muffled sound. All of it caused by a friction, a movement which I begin. Nothing much happens as a result, except for the small amount I set in motion, the small movements I perform: a rolling of the neck, nails across a slightly shaky surface, the decision to add extra weight to the short day.
I make sounds with my teeth as I drive into the tunnel and the day hangs like a dark banner over the town, a heavy canopy of moisture and darkness and I drive into the tunnel where the lights are bright orange and the fans stand still a long time while I take shallow, cautious breaths so as not to be poisoned. My back-seat passenger starts to fidget, to stop talking, to sweat, fumbles for the handle to wind down the back window, but changes his mind on seeing my look in the back mirror. The conversation between us, which so far has been relaxed and natural, accompanied by creaks from the steering wheel, comes to an end. I pick up Dagens Nyheter and turn to page nineteen to read the obituaries and to study the small symbols above the names: crosses, hearts, circles and doves. Condensation starts fogging up the windows and someone in the tunnel begins to sound his horn, more and more drivers simultaneously do the same and I lean over the steering wheel and join in too. The newspaper slides down onto the floor, the backseat rigours my car has had to endure make it move as it was a live, restless animal that has got wedged within a large flock in a narrow enclosure. The car-bodies stamp in the narrow trap like herds in long rows in both directions, but suddenly the queue begins to move forwards and after a couple of minutes we are out in the open again in a roundabout that spreads us out to all four corners of the town. Where would you like to get off? I ask. He begins to explain, but I say that I could just as well take you to your doorstep, and when he protests, I do a U-turn and set off in the opposite direction while there is a sudden hush in the back seat.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
I make a U-turn II
I take my hands off the steering wheel and start conducting. Gigli and Merrill are beaux-esprits as well as friends, singing their hearts out. I conduct all three of us; it sounds beautiful, we are singing a Bizet opera together, I am moved by the song, by the trio I form with the maestros, the road surface is dry, the tyres grip well, the countryside does not sweep past at all, and I sit still and sing, my hair streaming sideways and horizontally out of the window. I drive fast and the fields lie motionless and the mirror works its way loose off the bracket it is fixed to in the middle of the windscreen. Tons and tons of snow have fallen here, moon upon moon has fallen. Birds, thunder and cries have risen and fallen over the as-yet open expanses of fields. Are they going to rise up against me now, relentlessly? The mirror strikes me on the head before falling between the front seats, and the tenor and baritone sing on while my car swerves onto the opposite lane. For a moment I expect my life to pass in review, that I will again see everything that has happened, separate and together, a bird’s eye and worm’s eye view at one and the same time. I will relive happy times with people long since dead, put my arms round a neck once more, proudly tie my small girl’s laces — everything in a single flash. But then I manage to straighten the car up again and think luckily everything went all right, the mirror could even have landed on the floor and wedged itself between the brake pedal and the clutch.
I pick it up and hold it against my face. I can see a small effusion of blood high up on my forehead and after a while I feel dizzy and unfairly treated, as I always do when I am hurt or frightened, so I take out a thermos and as I drink the hot honey water I hear a car with a broken exhaust approaching at high speed. As it passes, I see that the driver has put on an old man’s mask in front of his face. The hair of the mask is white and long and the cheeks are sunken, the chin and the nose are oversized. I adjust the mirror I have just put back and in it I see the mustard-yellow Toyota disappear behind me. The bump on my forehead is swelling up, but the open-window aria along with the duet have given my brain plenty of oxygen. The honey drink has also raised my blood sugar, thus I make a U-turn and set off after the masked driver.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Interior I
while I move quickly from one place to another I can find myself thinking about the light pinewood floors that support me, humbly serving with their recessed, outstretched planks and that it is the generous vegetable kingdom which will also in future provide my meals, simple but nutritious, and that I will keep the oak bed — my nighttime vessel — and above all the colourless clothes I wear as a defense — my linen skirt from which sounds are torn without ripping, it is related to the finest fabrics, satin-silk-damask, is form-fitting and has buttons down the front and I go down the corridor and into the waiting room where there are photographs hanging on the walls and in one of them several people can be seen in a forest, smiling and the floor is hidden beneath a square-patterned carpet which I walk systematically round for a while before the door opens behind me and a voice says my name
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Interior II
Inside the heated, cruciform church a man is lying on the floor. He is wearing red mittens, is sleeping uneasily and kicks out with his legs like a dog from time to time. He is lying on a stretch of carpet right at the intersection of the cross and next to him is a table where a collection box and lit candles have been placed. He is not dreaming of anything he can later recall; it has been a long time since he did that. His liver and lungs move gently and painfully inside his body, and he snores irregularly and sometimes mumbles indistinctly. That after half an hour of restless sleep he is going to get up and stuff the collection box under his filthy quilted anorak comes as no surprise, will hardly be remembered for any length of time. The event will soon glide imperceptibly into the history and ecology of the interior.
It would be natural to believe that the three other visitors would light candles for him and put pieces of paper with requests for intercession in the little basket that has been placed there. But they do not do so. They think only of themselves and their own worries, writing carefully on the small yellow pieces of paper: “Pray that I get rid of my eczema” or : “Pray for my niece, who can’t stop gambling.” One of them sits down heavily on a pew and looks at the sleeping figure. Reckons that the walls are two metres thick, the man is thirty years old, the church eight hundred and the total displacement only two millimetres.
The sleeping man dreams and no one prays. Inside his office the vicar is thinking of turkey while sitting at his desk. He is thinking of starfish, terylene shirts and his children, but most of all of turkey. The letter from the bishop lies unopened in front of him, and he draws crosses and squiggles on the yellow envelope while he thinks of apples and prunes and rosemary: the stuffing which is best suited to turkey. The man lying at the intersection of the cross moves uneasily once again, for he is dreaming again of something he will not be able to remember; that he is small and is sitting in an oak tree with ruddy cheeks and brown eyes and white milk-teeth and his mother is singing beneath him and the meal is ready and the world stretches out endlessly to all points of the compass.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Figuratively
I take a few steps and look up from the shoes of deep-blue Italian leather into his face: it is light, unusual. If the shoes could only tell, if the shoes could only tell of the hand that shaped them, of the shoemaker and the shoemaker’s ancestors. If the shoes could only tell of the Etruscans; they are who I would most like to know something about.
I hold my glass right, nod at F’s unassailable speech and have considerable problems knowing what to say. I squirm, chatting about something to right and left-about decadence perhaps, more quickly than usual: don’t sound too intense, anything but that, rather blasé and with my body language under control. It doesn’t work. So I am left standing there, alone at the edge of the group while I go on looking at other people’s shoes, the feet in the shoes, clad in stockings shimmering, but what about the skin, what hasn’t it been through in the way of leather and pressure, water and cold? And the underside of the feet; I know my own undersides, a soreness under the soles, toes that feel squeezed even in my best shoes. It is autumn now, ought we not rather be together collecting mushrooms, fetching in the apples, cooking something over a fire? Shouldn’t we rather have scratched signs or geometrical figures in the hillside, run amongst the trees? I stand in front of the rectangles formed by the pictures. They keep me in position in the room with their inexplicable grip, and I study F and G and M on the sly while they eat their canapés and converse and smoke. I long for them. F greedily gulps tobacco smoke down into his lungs, leaning forwards towards the others who gesticulate with their glasses and cigarettes, nodding their heads, spectacled or with jewelry in their ears, rollnecks, white shirt fronts, plaited long hair falling over a suit. They laugh quietly or noisily, according to what is called for, point and wave. Fragments of conversations reach me and M lifts at the same time his lower arms, bares his wrists, makes gestures in the air in the direction of the largest canvas. They all look friendly, have different-coloured eyes that look out of heads in their own different ways they are prize specimens and we belong to the same species, carry whole lives, have known thousands of people. Nevertheless, we are weightless on the parquet flooring, are merely an accumulation of chemical substances, undetonated, waiting for the flare of death.
I turn round, look at his jacket, chosen with care: “It suits me, my temperament and my position here in the world,” he has thought, humbly perhaps considering the distinctiveness of this article of clothing, its fit, the soft woven surfaces, the cool lining.
“With this single piece of attire I will reduce my outer apparition, with its clear-cut lines this jacket will help emphasize my inner qualities, indeed, my ability to love, provide glimpses of the short but significant stays I have had under distant skies and at the same time make me ordinary, bear witness to countless hours spent around the stove, the bath tub, the iron in the house where I am stationed now, where I find shelter.”
I move around the room, awkward and preoccupied though perfectly justified. I ask him a couple of questions, but he does not reply in a way that can confirm my assumptions. And what about the pictures? They hang there on the walls, have released me from their rectangular grip and are either without titles or called ‘Attack’, ‘Assault’ or ‘Coincidences’ and I look at them with new eyes. They forgive the eye, they convert surface into time, and I accept them completely as landings in our extended and isolated lives.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Amongst all that is awake I
The map of the battle zones is redrawn, an emergency warning is put out. A boy looks for his mother. An old man with a heart sweet and blue-black as a ripe plum says that everyone who has come back from the dead will be happy for the rest of his life, that he will return there. Meanwhile the world will be unapproachable, a primeval mirror which we gaze and gaze at without understanding. We are to be at home yet long for home. We are to sit awake, eat compulsively, gulp in moonlight and toss and turn because the simplest things seem to call for deep absorption and patience. The pressure from the silent parts of the memory will increase. It comes from the nursery, dry and fragile, and we search through all our vocabularies but have been transplanted here; rejected tissue, exhausted with watching, without replies and stretched out between now and now but no longer on guard. We dream with open eyes towards the days: hunger-speckled. Towards the nights: fat; silent; deeply dark.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Amongst all that is awake II
I rely on the brain, I rely on it for this: that it controls the chemistry which is always on the go with its whooshing and its sugary mix. That it fixes enough oxygen for me to get along. That it keeps at a distance the very worst in language, that which circulates bold and unabashed inside its delicate mazes and binds together fat and protein and words of wisdom. That it coldly rejects that which rises to the unrecognizable, which concurs with everything people say: shopkeepers, newsreaders, vicars. Invoked or not, the words do not be afraid come, they filter in and out of my head like a small god. Then I am exposed to it again, protect myself with small shields against all the noise, gaze at the clouds, the moon, the blacked out ships — everything that holds my tiny world together, and I put my trust in the brain’s intrepid agents: they shoot like marksmen, coolly smuggle in whatever is in short supply, the usual: faith, hope, love.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Amongst all that is awake III
something has been razed to the ground again and we lie together in a trance; you rounded off in sleep — white-skinned, sleeping against the keen night while I scrape myself up again on the electric space which has expanded into a kind of world space, all too vast for me, so I lie still, stiff with troubles and memories, but trained in withstanding low voltage, falls in temperature, stars that fall, repetitions upon repetitions, for everything serves that which is to come: the new days with foliage and gold-leaf and soaring flight, you who will wake of your own accord and look at me
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Amongst all that is awake IV
The brain: proud, amoeba-like. On the back: happiness’s high hump. A twin takes me by the hand, accompanies me towards death and indulgence and whole worlds first through a garden of snakes then through green waters. There is singing there, but someone stops up our ears and lashes us to the mast of reason. Our neanderthal hearts beat so strongly.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Amongst all that is awake V
The table never sleeps, gathers us around it, four-legged, three-coloured, upright as now, murmuring-dreams with open eyes, lopped, chopped, it has been forest, it has been felled, sowed itself anew, has waited for the seed, the flesh. The table knows the impotence of logic, my elbows, lower arms, knows my changing manners, the bottle-green dress, the salty meals, the ceremonies in the polar night; flame, oil and water.
Words are spoken here, but the table does not interpret the oracles too literally. It stays silent and holds itself up, laid.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
Amongst all that is awake VI
one night it is the slender writing, unassuming, sloping, leaning over a dry page that I am suddenly full of tenderness for, its ambiguous utterances, marshaled in orderly fashion pointing to the right, towards the future, towards that which I can expect for myself and I am waiting, attentive to its opposing nature and force when it takes over the left hemisphere of the brain and corrects, trims, gives depth to that which I thought flat, flattens the most pompous declarations sentence by sentence, bears burdens, mixes together death and life, brings a kilo of butter, two pounds of oxtails, three nectarines and I wait obediently and it reels off the only thing I know anything about now: blue peak, yellow tooth, white feather, warning mouth. It asks, what is it that is important? and to be honest I feel it is best to answer ignorabimus, which means: that we will never know
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
This ideal moment
Happiness waits — elevated and grave.
I go to mass: Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori.
An adventurous life awaits me.
I do not waver in the face of it.
Someone says: Wait and see, but I do not wait.
I take the name Roslin.
Follow the guiding star.
Gain master energy.
Float freely in the world’s palate.
Strange. This ideal moment persists.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
After Hamelin
We pretend we can have everything we ask for:
Whipped cream and vanilla on the tongue
day-shelter, brief night-watches
a capacity to break into each other’s lives fearlessly
a good government in power behind the forehead
days and nights protected beneath a fence of hissing anti-time.
Suddenly, though, evening is here.
We follow the pied-piper’s flute
along the mossy paths away from the village.
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
Torild Wardener
even the dervishes
the days balance inwards in us
long-suffering and airy with their odd
three-cornered hats askew, and we can’t stop laughing
and fall and slide where it is crowded and slippery and gay
suddenly though they give a stretch and do arabic fly springs till
we regain our composure, we fall silent, hiccough and even
the dervishes stop spinning
(Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons)
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