MARTINSON, Harry


Something in her eyes is an unreachable

yet lovely glow from the unspoken:

the attraction that ambiguity often holds

when the beauty of the riddle prevails.

She draws curves, her nails shine

as dimmed lights through the dusk of the hall.

She says: follow this curve with numbers, here

where my grief’s darkness casts its shadow.

//////////////////////////////////////////////

I stood in the dream’s cathedral of fear

The big copper woman, who lay there

with her back soldered to the lid of the sarcophagus

drove terror into me, shackled my foot with led

That the copper woman knew who I was

I immediately sensed as a deadly weight

and that I had been summoned here by her alone

of this I am sure.

…from the gallery’s emptiness the organ’s pipes glimmered

like stalactites in the arch of a cave

…there was nothing…

that could help collect my crumbling courage.

For all was fulfilled as was written in stone

in a time when water deserted all plants

and it was said that man shall pass away

and become dead stuff’s dead slave.

…from the towers bells suddenly fell down

towards earth, shaken by the ore-marbled roar

and the copper woman rose, a cry

as of Erinyes traveled from afar

unto her lips when she pulled me in

tight against her copper body in fearful death.

And while the final, frightened insight emerged

cooling the spark of every sense of joy

I gazed towards the law of space where my thoughts wrote

a guilt-laden formula: better to be dead.


Have you seen a tramp collier

Have you seen a tramp collier come out of a hurricane—

with broken booms, gunwales shot to pieces,

crumpled, gasping, come to grief—

and her captain gone all hoarse?

Snorting, she puts in at the sunlit wharf,

exhausted, licking her wounds

while the steam thins in her boilers.

The Visions

With fright in their eyes

the soldiers of salvation beheld

from the helmeted observatory tower: the heavenly harps;

the swaying, titanic nebulae

and their chaotic strings of gaseous gold.

Far off in the boundless crystal of places beyond time

where thought in fright

can plunge everlastingly through millennia

stirred the gaslike golden bowers of the harps

effervescing in Sagittarius.