On the outskirts of life expectancy,
the flight of swifts
empty into Cern's accelerators
as particle traces

and the songs,
each one and all together,
inscribe themselves in the visitor books
of historical sanctuaries,
like Dylan's Time Passes Slowly
in the Gustaf Wickman wooden church
of Jukkasjärvi parish in Kiruna:

”Like the red rose of summer that blooms in a day,
time passes slowly and fades away”

while the concentrated absent-mindedness of the rain
in the northern woodlands
becomes more obvious
than southerly seasons' accelerating motors
on distant summer night highways

The body remains - as far as possible -
death's antidote

In Japan, Terry Riley dries up
like a tomato plant in a dry spell,
enthusiasm unimpaired,
but his flow of words increasingly more difficult to interpret;
his gaze distant;
his smiling morphemes tripping over one another,
until his loquacity transforms into an essence
of the phonemes of his personality,
like his early harmonium work Untitled Organ
in a recording from a Manhattan loft in 1966.

On the outskirts of life expectancy,
the days take on more bodies than can fit,
so low-paid, nonchalantly disinterested blue-collar workers
heat up crematory ovens into effective fire,
like the shift crew the tank furnace
at the Glassworks of Oxelösund in 1967,
and in the cremation exchange bureaus the rate stays fixed;
corpse in, bucket of sand out

Tired, I seep out into a crevice in the memory grove,
the immediacy of tussocks covering me,
some of my old thoughts, scattered in the wind,
lost by perfunctory incautious cemetery workers
in muddy rubber boots,
or by rosy-cheeked youths in colourful coveralls
on first summer job assignment,


We are not deceived by how things appear;
everything exists in countless different ways