Oblique Landscape
JP Jacobsen, I read your poem
of a boundless heath with mossy stones
where you were born and where you returned
with the tungsind poet
that ‘died the death, the difficult death.’
Shadowgraph naturalist, translator of Darwin
enduring sufferer of tuberculosis
who loved six enraged steadfast women
for the poet to tune the mood to its core.
JP Jacobsen, can you tell me of my oblique landscape?
the thick darkness envelopes the drastic day
I am visited by the Intelligent Angel,
the Neutral Angel, and the Terrifying Angel
each one brings a gift impossible to decipher.
Follow the footprints.
We are walking.
Let us be crooked once again.
The trembling question is asked
whether the fourth New Angel is
localized or metastasized.
Generalizations are for the Devil.
Let’s focus rather on the moment:
see the spider on the web
listen to the rain on the window pane
let’s be wildly polylogic
my soul-explosion expands in laughter
and expounds out onto outrageous love.
This walk is not straight
it is a crooked tale
my feet and fingers wander wayward
isn’t it good to be lost in the wood?
with the mind’s ears and eyes of darkness
the screech owl glides through the dusk
searching for philosophers who have gone blind
madness is a forgotten way
so let us be crooked once again.
Pay attention.
This is my dialectic.
Meeting a badger for the first time in the midnight rain
loping between the wood and the retreating road
before descending into the multi-chambered sett
hearing the magnificent frog
croaking on a leaf in the tepid pond
then leaps down diving into another world.
JP Jacobsen, can you hear me still?
this is my diremption
my broken middle
forever dwelling in the contradiction.
Bartholomew Ryan is the author of Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa (Reaktion Books, 2024).