("Heard in a dream...")

RIKA LESSER

FOUR POEMS BY GUNNAR EKELÖF

OECUS

It happens sometimes when I lie sleepless

on the bed with bronze paws, under the silent lamp:

I hear the slaves rustling and whispering nearby-

didn't the heavy, shadowlike curtain stir just now?

Are they deciding if they dare enter this room

if they dare approach me? I am a stranger here

while they belong to the household. But perhaps they

don't dare

because I am one of the living, because the Oecus

the master's chamber, is forbidden to them and holy?

Maybe it's the major-domo whispering out there:

The raised whisper-someone in the crowd is contentious

is calmed down, reassured. -Dragging steps and silence

I wrap myself in the blankets which disintegrated long

ago

and it. Is that the curtain stirring again?

Or did the lamp flicker? What draft can exist

in this house, close as it is? I am here simply as a person

in need of shelter. Did someone lift the curtain? Or want

something of me?

Sometimes when I wake from my sleep or torpor

I feel as if someone had just touched me

as if someone had awkwardly tried to stroke my hand.

Heard in a dream in the year 63, on the ısth of the

harvest month at night:

"You lie asleep in a sarcophagus with no bottom"-

Half-wakened by these words, neither asleep nor wholly

awake

the marble-coffin comes to my mind more distinctly

its shadows, its shimmering whiteness, a few clear details

RIKA LESSER

first the rough-hewn inner sides, two long, two short:

The stonecutter has not gone to much trouble here

everywhere chisel-marks show, the corners are round

He seems to have bestowed all his skill on the outside

with its fruits flowers birds dolphins bucrania

its fragments of myths: two figures sailing in scallops,

holding veils filled with wind over their heads

I am searching for my name-then with the clear logic

of the dream it strikes me: since the coffin has no bottom

it must also lack a lid. And he who rests there

lies with his back against Nothing and his face toward

Nothing.

Only the force field of the four walls holds the sleeper

floating between the bare interior's demand to forgo

and the power of the exterior, ornate with myths, to

desire-

Virgin, O Atokos, when this force field will be broken

let me, in the dream, be neither reborn nor begotten

What came before this has no scars from chisels.

What is to come has no fruits or flowers.