“The Baltic Seas”

I first read Tomas Tranströmer in a class taught by the late Lucie Brock-Broido —either the poetry workshop that I took with her my freshman year of college or her more advanced workshop called Radical Heat, which was organized around an idea she later wrote of as "a nonchemical energy transfer with reference to a temperature difference between a system (The Poet) and its surroundings (The Poem)." Alchemy, autumn, and Emily Dickinson were Lucie's muses. Tranströmer, with his plainspoken, even stark, lyricism, seemed to me at first quite the opposite of heat. " Windows and Stones ": his writing charts the movement of thought, how certain distances and cool contemplation could form a universe. But Lucie knew, and I soon learned, that behind his sometimes closed doors hid burning insights. In that moment, long before he won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, his work won me over.

A rethinking of our world and its future pervades "The Baltic Seas," Tranströmer's long poem, here translated by the poet Robin Robertson. In Robertson's rendition, the poem cascades between telegrams and wonderings—"Did he keep a map of the maze in his head?"—between walks with the dead, tilted gravestones, and sea-bound logbooks. Tranströmer's poetic seas are a place "where thoughts are constructed with emergency exits, / where a conversation between friends becomes a test of what friendship really means."

The effect is meditative and moving, an urgent quietude not always found in the Sturm und Drang that attends both our contemporary poetry and our politics. This is to say that the revelations of "The Baltic Seas"—written and published in Swedish fifty years ago, during the Cold War—endure, as pointed as they ever were. "No side is the lee side. Everywhere is risk. / As it always was. As it is." Tranströmer's stoic yet encompassing recounting of history indeed remains radical, his pocket epic reminding us of the stakes of war and the national borders that we draw, even across our warming seas. (And, to quote the inimitable De La Soul, "Stakes Is High.") His "dry sighing / of huge doors opening, huge doors closing" echoes across the decades.

— Kevin Young

This was a time before radio masts.

Grandfather was a pilot, newly licensed. In his almanac he logged each craft he guided— its name, destination, draught. Some examples from 1884: Steamer Tiger Capt. Rowan 16ft Hull Gefle Furusund Brig Ocean Capt. Andersen 8ft Sandöfjord Hernösand Furusund Steamer St Petersburg Capt. Libenberg 11ft Stettin Libau Sandhamn

He took them out into the Baltic, through the wonderful labyrinth of islands and water. And those people who met on board and were carried together for a few hours, a few days, how well did they get to know each other? Talking in misspoken English, understanding and misunderstanding, but with no real deceit. How well did they get to know each other?

Thick fog: half-speed, and almost zero visibility. Out of nowhere, the headland came with one huge stride, and was right on top of them. A long blast on the foghorn every other minute. His eyes reading straight through the void. (Did he keep a map of the maze in his head?) Minutes passed. He had those shallows and skerries off by heart, like the verses of a psalm. And that feeling of "we're here, right here" that you have to hold on to, carefully, like you're carrying a pail, full to the brim, and you daren't spill a drop.

A glance down into the engine-room. The compound engine, as long-lived as a human heart, labouring in huge, tender, pumping motions—steel gymnastics—the aromas rising as if from a kitchen.

The wind walks through the pine forest. Heavy seething; light breathing. In the middle of the island the Baltic is also sighing; deep in its forest you're out on the open sea. The old woman loathed that sound in the trees, and she stiffened with sorrow at the rising wind: "You have to think of them—out there in the boats." But she heard something else in the sighing—we both do, being kin. (We're walking together now, though she's been dead these thirty years.) The wind sighs yes and no, understanding and misunderstanding. The wind sighs three strong children, one consumptive and two gone. The gust that breathes life into some flames, blows others out. The conditions. The wind sighs: Save me, Lord, for the waters have compassed my soul. You walk on, listening, for a long time, finally reaching a point where the boundaries open out or rather when everything becomes a boundary. An open place sunk in darkness. And from the dimly-lit buildings all around it, people streaming. Murmuring.

A fresh gust, and the place falls empty again, and still. A fresh gust, that sighs of other shores. It speaks of war. It speaks of places where citizens are controlled, where thoughts are constructed with emergency exits, where a conversation between friends becomes a test of what friendship really means. So when you're with someone you don't know well: control. Some frankness is fine, as long as you don't lose sight of what's drifting there on the edges of the conversation: that darkness, that dark stain— it can drift in and destroy everything. Don't let it out of your sight. What is it like? A mine? No, that's too solid. Almost too peaceful—around our coasts the stories about mines are frightening at the start, but they all end happily. This one, for instance, from the lightship: "It was the autumn of 1915 and we slept uneasy . . ." etc. A contact mine was spotted drifting towards the lightship, dipping and rising in the swell, sometimes hidden by a wave, then glimpsed, briefly, like a spy in the crowd. The panicking crew were shooting at it with rifles. Useless. Finally, they put out a boat and tied a long line fast to the mine and towed it, slowly, carefully, back to the experts. Later, the black, spiked, empty shell was displayed in a sandy garden, as a decoration, surrounded by Strombus gigas, pink conch shells from the far West Indies.

And the wind walks through the dry pines beyond, scurrying over the cemetery sand, past the leaning stones, the names of the pilots. The dry sighing of huge doors opening, huge doors closing.

In the half-dark corner of the Gotland church, in the soft, mildewed light, stands a baptismal font of sandstone—twelfth century—the stonecutter's name still there, bright as a row of teeth in a mass grave: HEGWALDR the name still there. And his tableaux here and on the sides of other vessels, crowds of figures swarming out of the stone. The eyes like split kernels of good and evil. Herod at the table: the roasted cock flies up, crowing "Christus natus est" (the servant is taken out and killed) while, close by, the child is born under clustered faces as serious and helpless as young monkeys. The fleeing footsteps of the pious echoing over the dragon-scaled mouths of the drains. (These scenes are stronger in memory than when you're actually there, strongest when the font revolves slowly in the mind like a rumbling carousel.) No side is the lee side. Everywhere is risk. As it always was. As it is. Only inside is there peace, in the unseen water held in the vessel— but outside, the battle rages. Tranquillity can come, drop by drop, at night perhaps, when we know nothing, or when we're taped up to a drip in a hospital ward.

People, beasts, ornaments. There is no landscape. Ornaments.

Mr B––––––, my fellow-traveller—delightful, exiled, freed from Robben Island—remarks: "I envy you. I feel nothing much for nature. People in a landscape, though—that speaks to me."

Here are some people in a landscape. A photograph from 1865. The channel steamboat sits at the dock in the sound. Five figures. A lady in bright crinoline, like a bell, a flower. The men like extras in some folk play. They're all handsome, vague, beginning to fade away. They step ashore for a moment. They're fading away. The steamboat is a discontinued model— high funnel, awning, narrow hull— completely bizarre, like a docked U.F.O. Everything else in the photo seems shockingly real: the ripples across the water, the opposite shore— I can feel the rocks' roughness with my hand, hear the sighing in the firs. It is here. It is now. These waves are today's.

Now, it's a hundred years later. The waves come in from no-man's-water and break against the stones. I walk along the shore. Walking along the shore is not what it was. You have to stretch your mouth too wide, keep too many conversations going at once; your walls are thin. Everything has grown a second shadow behind its first, and even in the utter darkness you hear it dragging after you.

It's night.

The strategic planetarium rotates. The lenses stare into the dark. The night sky is packed with numbers, all being fed into a piece of furniture like a flickering cabinet holding the energy of a locust swarm, stripping Somalia bare in half an hour.

I don't know if we're at the beginning, or coming to an end. No conclusion can be made; no conclusion is possible. The conclusion is the mandrake (see the compendium of myths and magic: MANDRAKE the miracle root which shrieks so loud when he pulled it from the ground that the man would die—so a dog had to do it).

From the lee side, some close-ups.

Bladderwrack: The kelp forests gleam in the clear water; they are young and fresh and you want to go there to live, to stretch out on your own reflection and sink to a certain depth—the weed streaming upright on air-bladders—just as we are buoyed up with ideas.

Bullhead: The fish that is really a toad that wanted to be a butterfly, but only made it a third of the way; he hides himself in the weeds, but is lifted up in the net, snagged by his pathetic barbs and carbuncles—your hands, when you untangle him from the mesh, are shimmered with slime.

Rocks: Insects tick over the sun-warmed lichen, quick as second hands—the pine throws a shadow, it moves slow as the hour hand—inside me, time stands still: endless time, the time it takes to forget all speech and createperpetual motion.

On the lee side you can hear the grass growing, a faint thrumming from far below, the faint flume of millions of miniature gas flames underground—the sound of grass growing.

And now: the wide stretch of open water, without a door to be seen; the open boundaries that grow broader and broader the further you reach out.

There are days when the Baltic is a calm, unending roof.

Dream innocently of something out there, pawing its way over it, trying to sort out the flag-ropes, trying to hoist the rag—

the banner so frayed by the wind, so smoke-blackened and sun-bleached it can belong to us all.

But it's a long way to Liepāja.

30 July. The straits are behaving oddly—today, for the first time in years, teeming with jellyfish, pumping themselves along, calmly and carefully; they all belong to the same shipping company, Aurelia, and drift like flowers drift after a sea-burial; if you take them out of the water they lose their shape—just as when an indescribable truth is drawn up from the silence to be laid out in a lifeless mass—so they are untranslatable, and must stay in their own element.

Sometimes you wake up at night and scribble down the words on any scrap, the edge of a newspaper perhaps (the words effulgent with meaning), but in the morning, those same words say nothing: scribbles, slips of the tongue. Or fragments, perhaps, of some high style that slid by in the night?

Music comes to a man. He's a composer, whose work is performed; he has a career, he becomes director of the conservatory. Conditions change, the authorities' praise becomes blame. They set up his pupil, K––––––, as prosecutor. He's threatened, demoted, expelled. After some years the disgrace diminishes and he's rehabilitated. Then comes the stroke: paralysis of the right side, with aphasia—he can only manage short phrases, can only say the wrong words. Cannot, because of this, be ever touched again by praise or blame. But he still has the music, and he goes on composing in his own way: a medical phenomenon to the end of his days.

He wrote music to texts he no longer understood— in the same way we express something with our lives in that humming chorus of misspoken words.

The death-lessons went on for several terms. I attended along with people I didn't know (who are you, anyway?) then everyone sidled off on their own, became profiles.

I looked at the sky, at the earth, and straight ahead and, ever since, I've been writing a long letter to the dead on a typewriter with no ribbon, just the line of the horizon where the words hammer away, but never stay.

I stand with my fingers resting on the doorknob, taking the building's pulse. The walls are so full of life (the children are scared to sleep alone upstairs—what makes me safe makes them afraid).

3 August. Out there in the damp grass slides a greeting from the Middle Ages: the Burgundy snail in his jaunty shell of subtle greys and glimmering golds, introduced by monks who liked their escargots—yes, the Franciscans were here, they broke stone and burned lime, this island became theirs in 1288, a gift of King Magnus ("These charities and others like them / will be repaid in heaven") —the forest fell, the ovens burned, then the lime was shipped out for the building of their monasteries. . . . Sister snail almost motionless on the grass, her feelers retracting and stretching out—her searching just like mine in its disturbance and hesitation.

The wind that's been blowing so fastidiously all day (each blade of grass on the far skerries has been counted) has lain down peacefully in the middle of the island and gone to sleep. The match-flame stands to attention. The sea painting and the forest painting darken, bleed into one. The greenery of the five-storey trees is all turning black. "Every summer is the last summer." Empty words for the creatures in the late-summer midnight where the crickets treadle furiously on the sewing-machines of themselves and the Baltic's near and the solitary water-tap rears among the wild roses like an equestrian statue. The water tastes of iron.

Grandmother's story, before it's forgotten. Her parents die young, her father first. When the widow senses the disease would take her next she goes from house to house, island to island with her daughter. "Who will look after my little Maria?" A strange house on the other side of the bay accepts her. They are well-to-do, but that doesn't make them good. The usual mask of piety, the usual cracks. Maria's childhood is over, early, replaced with unpaid servitude. Perpetual cold, year after year. Perpetually seasick behind the oars; terrorized at table: the way they stared at her, the way the pike-skin crunched in her mouth: be grateful, be grateful. She never looked back but, because of that, she could see The New and she took it. Took herself out of the noose.

I remember her. I used to squeeze in close to her and at the moment of death (the moment she passed over?) she sent out a thought so that I, the five-year-old boy, understood what had happened half an hour before the phone call.

I remember her. In the next brown photo is the one no one knows— someone mid-nineteenth-century, I'd say, by the clothes. A man about thirty: strong eyebrows, face looking straight at me, straight in the eyes, just whispering: "Here I am." But who this "I" is no one in the world remembers. No one.