In the neighbourhood of one bearing child
After all that was burnt out and buried
Eternity will not do, too brief
And too meagre.  No joy and no sheer fire
Only the sweet deathcry remains
And senselessly cruel, the glance cast on it.

Don't dawdle.  Don't sweat. Grieve.
For time and again pride and wrath trace
Their doubting outlines
In the slow silt of my regret.

My hunger preys on hope, my sea is barren.
I touch you and line each night up
Against nights as never before.
And feels himself lonely: human
Approaching human, the staunching and the life
Beside him.  No attempt to pledge the breath.

I grew up, heard pious warriors fleeing
I spoke, and after so many duties, pains
Another voice repeated what, with disgust
Callousness and hatred, eluded my imagination.

Shaking and undecided, the first steps
Back to a life that in torment
Awaits the mother's coming, a sharing
As if we'd been together all our lives.
Sometimes it's the breath, sometimes the precipice
That likens love to a delivering fire.
 
 

2. Wrath

I resist, for I would refuse and rage.
Thus I distribute my dreams:
In feasting, in memory, in folly.
And I, in a world that humiliates and destroys
And I and heaven and earth heavy with
The fever of what my fever repeats.

Wait.  Even the blood in us has moved on
And dawn brings the east wind,
The locust back.
Far from mankind, I hear of days gone by.

I become a double, the name of everything
Shielded by a hand
That horrifies and brings to life.
Shadows have given way,
Despair dwells above the sun.
I close my eyes and cross my arms and legs.

Rainbow.  Rainbow.
After the third generation the fourth and so forth.
And at the splitting of the seed,
Besides the raven, all hope seemed gone also.

The days are purified, all that gave offence
Removed and dishonoured.  Slumber and bonds.
Erring.  And it will rain and round the ruins
Of this day, other ruins will thrive
And born again from sorrow
Only truth will deserve our crown.
 
 

3. Greed

Equal to seven years at least, the cold glow
Of at least seven virtues.
Equal to the rage of moonlight
That metes its measures and stretches mantles over the gut.
Equal to the baiting of beetles squirming
Among the maggots.  And from person to person.

There is the silence that covers silence
A net stretched over forgetting.  A pale awakening
Infectious and monotonous, while creatures of the night
Creak, calcify and decay.

All that is given is costly.
And above the storm floats silence
Over a welfare state that flows on further. 
"Bear fruit and multiply.  Fill the earth 
And subdue her.  Sow the seed 
Before you: all this to eat."

For hunger means what the human means
The beseeching, the shudder of mountains and seas,
And continents that die out
Shrivelling into a valley of craving.

Like shaky writing I discover impotence,
Distance and thirst.  No shore, no song.
I clench a thousand words, the difference
Between erring, death and death.
Greed and defeat caress within me
For home and order have plunged into the sea.
 
 
 

4. Envy

No one since then.  This land does not preserve the damage
Only decline. Lacking here:
A slab, a procession, a field and a grave
Nor is this end of importance.
Here the year determines gout or transports
For the very ones who will defeat us.

Not a trace is eaten away.
What was described shame fitted us for,
Or a whole lifetime sufficed,
Was aroused and wallowed as an ill tide.

No choice.  Darkness covers cruelty,
The shoreless deep, and not a lament echoes
From person to person, not a word.
What shame will master us?
What sadness soothes us?  I came back
And I felt comforted.

You can write, repeat deliriously what pain does
What, as truth, destroys dreadfully, a wen
Rotting yet enduring.
And so it is better that nothing be.

After every journey, the overflowing.  The white of my eye
Which chooses new pigments, and meets with margins.
I mention more and less, my accomplices
My jealous gestures.  With shame I measure
Growing older maybe, a warmth
That satiates and digests.  Or maybe remains.
 
 

5. Lust

(for Myra)

Believe in me, for I believe in you
Refusing what was and knowing what restrained us.
I shall give you a name, bear you with me beyond this life,
You, Unique, and shadow that covers me.
Through you I have come to be and with the scars
Of your tissues, the haze of you.

Such our silence, such our speech.
Nothing was promised us, only the life
That we chose can take us or leave us,
No pity, for nothing made us.

Because I saved my spittle for you, and now
After the night and the mist, live again in your fears
And try to protect you from the horror.
No keen is needed any more, the pain has stopped
And sufficed.  Only you and I split open and thrive
In the clearing unknown of tenderness.

Our landscape lies awkwardly, a creation story
In our seeking and finding, irretrievable pursuit
Of the submission that stretches our bodies.
Spin. Spin and hold me in your love.

So they will describe us, growing older
Than the falcon that begins its flight and traces wrinkles
Above the withered stubble of before and formerly.
No misunderstandings.  Between you and me no survival
For this day betokens the beginning of days for me.
You are my first day.  Here I am, for I will stay.
 
 
 

6.  Avarice

Nor a memory of this night, not a reproof
No commanding gesture, no resentment.
Purified by the swaying grass, and drops
Dream away my yells and my awakening.
No transition that can still astonish,
No delay lasts long enough.

And after nowhere, after the fading the losing
I replaced diseases with pain
And decayed with phlegm and slumber
In a shadow paradise meshed with time.

And I exchange every crop for your smile
I believe and I deny, as a foreigner ruling
In this realm of fraying rains.
An effort which delays the daylight,
In which the impotence of the lonely, threatening
Impotence, reflects and is watched.

Rambling, in a sweat fleeing again.
Many curses I shape, conserve my trembling.
Not a house in which there was no dead one
That was master and always shall be master.

So the day makes the days clear, in me the seeking
That shuns the tracks, the question that is never posed
And no answer one could endure.
I bear fruit and become skin, poisonous
And desiring, the shrinking accommodated.
I am addicted, a name that creeps up on me.
 
 

7. Pride

Both to truth, and to this life
This belief in what lies and what shares in cowardice.
From oppressive days of sadness
I have returned, mourning and pregnant
And sad and foolish as a child, timelessly clotted
On the sterile strands of response.

The dream one forgets, the city, this land
I have named nothing from the prayer. I don't intend unease
Nor the stamping flight from torment
For questioning ended long ago.

In you and me only one will shelters,
And one capacity and one cooling.  A dominion
In which we both live and never shall die.
And were I alone, alone only heard
And saw and spoke as if I were the rootless usurer
Of an unusual crop that thrives nowhere.

So I remain in transit, naked and divided
Within reach of horror.
My silence will not break, I am unused
To lip reading, to what is past.

I expect rain, but out of respect
For a language I shall never speak 
I forfeit the spear and the sponge and acknowledge
Uncertain but believing, a name in every generation.
And as a stranger in this new House
I renounce the morbid twitchings of the cross.
 
 

8.  Doubting Lust

Don't seek outside me, for to find my body
It is enough to call me.
Without preference I shall come to you.
Settling everything, in accord
With what I know of you: imagination
And above this world an eternity I do not know.

Shadowless I will lie beside you
For shivering in me you will seek the ecstasy
Of loneliness.  I am your place of rest,
The only shade for love and hate.

You will look for me, through the whole hellish earth
And nothing will disturb you, nothing frighten you
For everything passes on and you see a hundred gardens.

Whoever licks my lips, caresses life
And if I think now of things that are foolish
In a while I forget the odour of the woman's body,
Her panting and the grey folds of her skin
Beneath the breaking of my drying foam.

She realized herself: rod and reknown and grief
The silence of the slain or the cry
Of a sadness long enough beheld.
Consumed, her harvest floats down, with fruitless pearls
Over the chrome of a pink bathroom.

Be patient, I understand your words,
They called me a fool, a vagabond, a jester,
Long-suffering they all put up with me, all and a track
Got lost.  But possessed by devils I recognized
As truth what I knew from my dreams,
What made the woman my companion.
We bore gifts with us
And I gave you the name of some shrub or other.
Then silence lay somewhere between day and night
Love set her free from all other love.

Edges of cities, rings of rubber, and people
Who mean well by you, all their mouths together
Their measure and their gravity.
And thus repeating everything, learning like a serf,
In the dull fall of many rebel angels. 

See and cry out.  Love was buried
And centuries after the fish, it was the sweet hunter who conquered.
As we speak of heroes, in remembrance
Of a firmament full of rainbows.
Their lives they lost, us they have outgrown.

I name him with that which he names: names
Anyone can take from you.
I don't think and no one nears.

And my satiety.  Like a strange relation
For the first time I realize the pain does not cease,
That I draw honey from a dying race
From systems that metals comfort.

Seeing an almond means that the troubled
Enlightenment discovers only that death has after-effects.
I plead for a love that might engross me,
The forswearing of an old age that gnaws inside us
Spewing sperm, racks that defeat us
For none are called but all are compelled.
 
 

Translated from the Flemish by David Lloyd