Markku Paasonen (Finland)
Translated by Anselm Hollo
Mother Sewer
The clouds dragged their eyelids, shed salt-free tears, clouds with
cataracts, I lay in their moisture, I lay in the suppurating
half-dark of the streets and waited, wrapped the moisture tightly
around me and started talking to the sewer lid that was the only
warm spot in that chilly space. Mother Sewer, I proclaimed, I shall
lift aside the heavy cast-iron lid in order to descend into your
realm. I shall wade into your lap, dive into your flowing flesh,
abandoning friends and relations, I'll take along everything I can
manage to pry loose, I'll give it all to you, Mother Sewer, and you
shall receive it all, and donate it all to the sea. To you, nothing
is filthy, to you, nothing is evil. Your vault is full of dripping
nocturnal sunlight and the chemistry of rejected matter. You allow
everything to flow through your body to be born anew. Thus did I
chant to the benefactress who crawled along under the streets, my
lungs yearning for her generous breath suffused with a pregnancy of
decay, and blessed a creature who had never looked for profit.
Freeing the Sea
The sea is flesh swelling between shores, rising between rocks,
between its folds one sees glimpses of lips and apertures, sucking
and excreting. All of a sudden, the shore is covered in abandoned
mussel shells. Death is so quick today. In the distance, one can
discern a small sail. The sea turns over, and the sail sinks, the
wind raises a surge over it. Such are the indolent days spent on the
shore. But today there is something exceptional in the air. Could it
be speech? Could it be that the sea has learned how to excrete out
of the apertures of its body such a most noble substance, a
connective tissue consisting of words, that causes rocks and
seagulls to remain in their appropriate spots of the circle of life?
The sea's speech perturbs me. It wants change. Oh, observer, it
says. Take a needle and thread and sew my nostrils shut because the
air moving in them disturbs me. After you have sewn my nostrils
shut, sew my ears, too, to prevent exterior sounds from mingling
with my interior ones. Sew my navel, too, because I want to be rid
of an indication that I have ingested nourishment once upon a time.
The very thought disgusts me. Don't forget to sew my lips with a
double thread: I do not want anything to move in or out through that
repulsive aperture. Seal my teats with quick-drying glue, to release
me from the task of perennial nursing. Bend down between my legs,
pick a strong curved needle, the kind a cobbler uses to sew on
soles, string it with steel wire and sew my buttocks together from
top to bottom. Use the same wire to sew shot my labia so that I
shall be unable to experience any pleasure except for the one of
being bound. Pour pore-clogging paint over me, black, non-reflective
of light. Use that paint also to cover up the sky and the rocks on
the shore until nothing can be seen: only a black painting on a
black ground. Horrified, I listen to the sea's speech. No, I tell
it. I don't want any part of such imbecile action! To emphasise my
words I grab its folds with both hands. I tear at the apertures,
pierce the membranes, peel the skin and let loose the sea monsters
and sirens, the cachalots and Flying Dutchmen, until it is sheer
flow, a torrent foaming between the rocks, punctuated by islets of
flesh. Stubborn islets! They, too, must be removed out of the way of
the sea's turquoise liberation.