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Playing games: Mervi Kantokorpi on Aki Salmela's poetry
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Poems from Sanomattomia lehtiä and Leikitään
kotia ('Newsless newssheets', 'Let's play house', Tammi, 2004
and 2005)
Scent of morning
Say what you like about life, but life's nothing that's been said.
The sun sets in a sepia setting where together a man and a woman
walk out of the picture. At the start of the romantic's story candles
are lit, the girl stoops to hear better. Lonely stones roll from
the horizon's laughter, farewell to the continuity we love. Just
for a second you could see from his face what he'd look like in
twenty years.
Lonely stones
I don't want to disappoint anyone, but this isn't a story and it
has nothing to say. I watched a little girl trying to reach an unripe
apple on an old apple tree. They used to load up unnecessarily heavy
burdens. Yesterday's birds, for example, aren't today's. Aspens
grow in spite of their convictions, and yet there's still something
ingenious about puzzle pictures. He considered putting another coat
of paint on the kitchen ceiling. Time, progress and good taste.
The man breathed in her laughter. It's what's called love. That's
how sentences turn to stone. Light's playing on the house's bleached
face. Two pigeons on the windowsill of space and a marble angel.
The whisper came again: the secret of lasagne is nutmeg. The carpet
beater was beating carpets on a steel rack. Something made a move.
A stuffy moment, a man in his black swivel-chair. The heralds of
spring. Imagine all that somewhere else. Smoke rose from his nostrils
like steam from the sewers. It's what's called love. I watched a
little dog scampering around a girl. A thread always stuck out from
somewhere, likely to unravel the whole cloth. And I raised my hat,
bent to enter it and vanished.
An hour in St Petersburg
Purposeful purposelesness.
— John Cage
A day and night long as a saint's hair
all day I thought about doing this
and now I've finally arrived here, with you,
I'm considering going elsewhere, I'm considering
a caucasian beerhall, chicken kebabs, speech
released from people by the crystallised night,
October's lapping
on the windowsill,
it's the leitmotiv of this atmosphere so dear to me
in the wagnerian sense, I've
put a record on
Brian Eno: Music for Airports
why am I telling you all this?
surely I do have a reason
just as trees have their reason
their grain hidden from humanity
tonight I want language full of happenings
full of free thoughts on
the advancing staves of emotion
we're language-producing animals
we're perfectly justified in saying
this distinguishes us from the animals
I pop open
a bottle of unreal ale
Gösser
GUT BESSER GöSSER
I won't say more than this
about globalisation
I think
I feel some distant memory
stirring somewhere,
in the recesses of my cells?
in my brainwaves?
approaching
the tip of my tongue
I'll leave it unwritten, won't write
about the woman who
tonight in the vastnesses of russia
will die violently, like more than a hundred people,
killed by themselves or by somebody else,
rashly, with a kitchen knife or empty bottle,
increasingly nowadays with a gun,
and deliberately
the number's triple the figure in the us of america
and it's 43 times that in france
this is statistics
they've nothing to say about human suffering
a body is a body is a body
is a mind, is a sorrow, is delight
is an empty bottle devoid of spirit
green
I think of passing time
that it's an abstraction
but nothing real therefore
but evening
advances into night
the pendulum of day and night
swings over our life's abyss
no, no I'm not going to eschew pathos
its seductive dark confusing loops
I'll traverse the whole register
scarcely budging from my place
night long, life short
lights go on, electric flowers
trembling blue harebells
in the apartment block windows
in the main evening newscast of the day:
NORD OST
broadcast live
terrorists hostages policemen army media
relatives, tearful, exclusive interviews
specialists - an inexhaustible natural resource - the odd
curious passer-by defying the cold night
entertainment?
the heavy breathing of the news anchor
rises as thought bubbles into the frosty night
normalno
the president's face
tight, keeping it straight
how to describe a world
that expands explosively
in every direction?
they caught the assassin
a nice-looking fellow
if the world's unpredictable and you can't say anything for certain
this sentence too is useless
hooray!
useless art!
partisan or non-partisan
minutes thicken towards their end
or as an old man of a hundred
would say:
it all happened so quickly.
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21:57
22:00
22:05
22:06
22:11
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St Petersburg, 25 October 2002
Poems from Leikitään kotia (Let's play house',
2004)
II Obsessio ('II Obsession')
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
— Samuel Beckett
Have you ever used any of the following drugs? Is alcohol a problem
for you? Do you live in your parents' household? Do you subscribe
to insurance against unemployment? Have you become unemployed through
a strike or lockout? If elsewhere, where? Does your spouse receive
an allowance for taking care of the children at home? Have you replied
truthfully to these questions? Do you have anything to do? Do you
see that park? Do you not agree that it resembles a lampshade? Can
we stay here? Who the fuck is Aki Salmela? Do you consider that
narcissism? Would you apply the word 'perspicacious' to yourself?
Do you talk to yourself if no one's listening? Do you sing in the
shower? Do you have a favourite star in the sky? Are you sensitive
to beauty where beauty does not exist? How can we be sure it is
not sheer delusion? So who cares? Coffee or tea? Did you feel anything?
Shall we do it all over again?
Spring
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Trees here like dry comments,
dendrons
leading to heaven
—
and the birds
— they're singing as if the singing were
exalted
thought
And isn't it, he asked,
and
began a new story
that would never
end
The snow's conjured icy plants
into
the winter's garden
on warm days they sprout
quiet
water
Is there a more beautiful bird than a raven
when
it caws through a dense forest
into
invisibility
like
shadow melting into shadow
Furrows of age on the building's face
and a new
spread of makeup won't help
A faded old lady
I
sit on your balcony under
your
left eyelid
Your
long winter will soon be over
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15:23
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15:33
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Manali, 15 February, 2004
Translated by Herbert Lomas
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