I shall marry the Goldsmith's dead daughter Tor Ulven Selected Poems

1 i stand under a tree of hungry hands no i stand under nothing 2 i am heading to an absolute isolation solitude and emptiness mile after mile of desert I left behind me and last city passed a long time

i am heading to a great despair to a doubt that may be vanished only by major doubts 3 why do i stand silent if i have a mouth why do i stand still if I have feet why don't I see if I have eyes why don't i scream if i am caught in this misery because i am made of stone 4 there is something i cannot reach i do not know what it is i stretch the arms out after it air air air 5 what are you looking for in the sky i'm looking for a constellation that doesn't exist 6 in the human sphere there are not well so many significant things: nails brain bones * I by my own eyes have to access darkness. and calmness on the other side of them.

But who could to say the difference between black and green? Who lives and moves in your hands when you examine them under light a short moment? Many. The same who have never existed. Who exists and does not exist, exactly now? The forest is alive You can smell the odor of the fir branches amidst the night. The wind whizzes In you. In us. * I will travel to Eridu and I will create my broken jars with red images of the red-horn goat.

and the streaming water, which steers and drinks all of us. I will travel home to Eridu and marry the goldsmith's dead daughter. sitting on the threshold in the evening, I hear the neighbours laughter and the reborn flies around the glare of the oil lamp. * The suffering has no seat to alight on. You pursue oaks inside a church. Yes! now I suddenly see the chestnut tree you are thinking about, in darkness the white flowers, we are dust. The slide of a smile.

Projected on the hedge a late summer night, the shadows of insects that chase, perhaps a swallow.

Tor Ulven (19531995) Tor Ulven was a Norwegian poet. He is considered one of the major poets of the Norwegian post-war era, and he won several major literary prizes in Norwegian literature. His early works, consisting of traditional modernist verse poetry, were heavily influenced by Andr Breton and the surrealist movement. As the 1980s progressed he developed a more independent voice, both stylistically and thematically. The later part of his work consists mainly of prose. He committed suicide in 1995 in Oslo, the city where he was born.