Nine years

The words of the song are those you repeat before you fall asleep, the words
you hum for somebody to sleep, to wake, to fall asleep again. Can you go in
there and what can you bring back with you? What are you longing for.

Pictures as many ways for silence. My eyes are too big for my head.
This is how it has been for long now: I count all I see and I save it:
the trace of clothes and the track of tears. A camera shutting will be like a big black case that eats us up, up.

A kiss is a compass. A house is a bone, a home is a plant. I am soil, nothing
darker, when their braids drop in my palms, they grow.

Do you know how our dead ones slightly touch each other as they float by
down the river at night? Your brother bound a rope around the crocodiles mouth and then he bound his own hands around it. When they look away, their heads
are smaller, and in the mirror, their eyes are still.

Fast like rain, slow like a face after the lightning. She saw the tree crack
from white heat and the circles of years inside broke Nine years, the hair
a delta warm from inside out and flowing. Down the head, the cheeks, the legs,
our dreams were faster than we were.

Who do I resemble the most, who resembles me?

-Sara Hallström, 2006

(Written for "Braiding 1997-2005")

 

Wanting to be

A melody to wait for
A feather braided in the shake of the hand

A circle embracing, making a hole
kept inside a flower as it opens up

*

Alone the face is a park to walk through
rest, violence, dark spots among light trunks

You go from the body like a shadow, drifting
towards the end of the enclosure. Reocurring in the dream
are fences, mirrors, closets. The next border
is rocks, sand through breath, awakening

To stay, to turn with a flashing head
To let memory fall like a thorn or a tear in the fire

*

The tongue sticks to the ground, the bushes
The words sticks to the hair, the nails
The insides of fingers to the outsides of houses
Landscape and smiles repeating themselves as they are to disappear

You dance

*

The voice comes from the grass, picking up light

You are kept in places beyond faces and gardens
You are kept like yes fits in no

You say: Building a cloud is all it takes in my world

To search the sky in the surface of water
To open a bridge through the air

-Sara Hallström, 2008

(Written for "Braiding 1997-2008")