Jan Oskar Hansen, PT

 

 

Free Verse   A Country for old Men   I have been into town bought a paper and drank a beer, in the café where the old men sit in the afternoon shade. I feel more at ease here amongst other wrinklies. On the other side of the road, near the pharmacy, the big clock on the wall tells us it’s five and the temp is 41 Celsius, but in the shade and with a breeze blowing it feels fine. In a few years the big clock will tell us that time is up, but others will come and take our place. There is a vast pool of us in death's ante room; we are but tiny ants on a window pane so easily squashed by a child’s thumb. I sit in the shed, see how cigarette smoke spirals up and out before dissipating in still hot air, and thought of the silent sighs I heard when a beautiful girl walked past our café. We shall never possess anything as lovely again.     Where the Northwesterly Blows (memory of a town)   In the small park with gloomy trees, near where the factories used to be, was a bust of a man’s image on a plinth. I think it was made of bronze, the head was brown when not striped white by seagull droppings. Mother said he had been a Mesèn; she liked using odd words, desperately trying to keep afloat in a world of tinned sardines in oil and mackerel in tomato sauce. I took it to mean a rich man kind to working people and had donated this sad little park surrounded by damp factory walls; a place where the workers could sit and enjoy the sun. The park was only open Saturday Afternoons and Sundays—one couldn’t have people sitting there during work week. A child climbed over its fence and drowned in a tarn of green algae. The park was eradicated, just as the grim factories were thirty years later. Life was bleak in my town, one neon lit advert, on the night sky “Jesus Saves.” Competing with the stars, and a persistent rumour that the man in the suit shop wore ladies underwear.     Saturday Night in Blue   The house key was on the same ring as my car key, couldn’t find them I had locked myself out. Car neatly parked I never drink and drive, the bar is nearby. I broke a window in the back, got in. Blinking light outside: police telling me to open the door, I did, was wrestled to the ground. At the station they came to their senses, let me go, but refused to drive me back, since I smelled of booze and only had myself to blame. Long walk home, bars had shut. Climbed through, the same broken window, the keys, on the kitchen table. I uncorked a bottle of wine, opened the front door, just in case, no one came, I went to bed at dawn.     The Field of Mortality   On a field, not far from here, I see millions of lit candles in long rows, but only at night; in daylight it is a potato patch. A man, you may call him god if you like, walks among the candles— every so often he stops and with his thumb and index finger snuffs out light; the skin on his fingers are corned from this arduous work. Behind him new candles spring up, sometimes he turns and goes back to waste some of them too. He is heading for the part where the candles have been burned out, only the wick flickers. He uses his thumb to bump them off; a spiral of grey smoke in still air. He is old as time, sometimes he misses candles that keep on burning, although they have no wick. As dawn begins, behind the easterly mountain, the field of mortality turns into a potato patch again, where an old man is harvesting spuds.     How to write a Novel   I like to write a book, any book as long as it has my name on the cover. A one day course, how to write a novel. The course leader, a published writer, wore a long dress but I could see her ankles, they were beautiful and much younger than the rest of her. Dyed, red hair, face very pale, presumably from sitting in all day writing how-to books. Beginning, middle and an end, yes, like life, capricious in the middle, the ending tends to write itself. Sudden endings are best, run over by a bus, or a train crash, where cell phones go on ringing in the broken interior. Then silence. Long endings are best being avoided, hospital bed pages after pages, endless days, exhausted relatives. Lovely ankles, did she paint her toenails red? She wore flat shoes sensible for any woman over fifty. Classroom empty, they had all gone out for lunch, I went to the pub and stayed there. Beginning, middle and an ending, what more is there to know?     The Fado Singer   Our visitor was ninety two and could see far into the past and into a future that held no trepidation. Unaided she got up and sang us a Fado about love that never lasts and the sorrow of defeat... Melancholy, that’s Fado for you, but it’s also about how sweet love is, and the art of acceptance She lives in the shadow land of an impending ending and what is new and timeless. When she left she beckoned for me to kiss her, I bent down to touch her cheek, but she kissed my loveless lips. I was enamoured, and her eyes was clear as heaven; a woman is forever a woman even at ninety two.     Long Voyage and a Chinese Lady   Glittering ocean, there is no difference between the vast blue sky and the sea. I’m in a bubble, there is no escape. I walk on a rusty deck knowing this voyage will never end. Time is reduced to a trickle. The ship is bound for Nagasaki but we will never get there. I feel a wave of dread, the disparity between sunset and dawn is but a whisper. Magazines, books and old newspapers have been read and reread a thousand times, the playing cards are filthy by overuse— I have fallen in love with the print of the green Chinese lady in the salon. When voices are still I sit and watch her and will her to smile, but she’s inscrutable. Seagulls, the sea has changed colour, grey and foamy, the air is no longer pure. Nagasaki has come to our rescue and saved us from mortal weariness. The city will dock alongside us in the afternoon.     The Fur Coat   During the Cuban missile crises (remember?) mother came home with a few white rabbits. For breeding, she said and put them in a box under the bed. In case of war we’re not going to starve as we had in the last one. Rabbits breed fast mother—had to move out of the bedroom. The cat ran off, I couldn’t go to school spending the whole day finding fodder for them. When the crisis blew over we had 300 rabbits indoors. Luckily a lady, the wife of a shipping mogul and dedicated to animal welfare, took them to an island she had in the stream. (Hemingway) And all was well, our cat returned and I could go back to school again. The following winter was cold, the stream froze solid; foxes could cross over—when spring came there were no rabbits left. Well, that’s what we were told. Later, standing outside the opera house ogling as the loaded, cultured, and hangers on left the building, I saw the mogul’s wife too—she wore a beautiful white fur coat, which we, plebs, greatly admired.     The Legend   Where the track narrows and overhanging trees makes it spooky I usually hesitate, there is here a profound melancholy unseen in the eyes of reformed drunks. I hear a rider coming up behind me— I give way. On a white stallion, sits a thin woman— she looks straight ahead and sees me not. T horns from trees have scared her face, blood drips like rose petals on her blouse. In the soft underground I see no hooves mark. Legend has it an Englishwoman had tried to cross the river a day when it was deep, horse and human was never seen again. I know where they are, the stallion is the white crested wave that slams on to sandy shore and tried to get a hoof hold, solid enough for the dolphin nearby to ride it. If they succeed they will be able to ride east where dawn begins.     Grey Hospital and a Brazilian Café   The hotel where I stayed served lousy coffee, insipid and milky. I knew there was a Brazilian café nearby, on my way there I walked past the closed down city hospital. Grey walls dripping of uncured diseases, graffiti and dead windows. Convert it into an office block, but who wants to work there, a place haunted by cynical doctors and indifferent nurses who stalk the halls at night waiting for their shift to end so they can get out from this place of horror, and patients they have lost interest in and can do nothing for. Tear it down and throw the debris down a gully. At the Brazilian café the coffee was strong and healthy; the staff, young, moved as dancers to the music in the background. There is much of Africa in the Brazilian soul, passionate, courageous; yet, sometimes, viciously moody. The girl who served me coffee, smiled with lips and eyes, her skin dark, glowing… fit. And the sad hospital faded into oblivion.