The Bravest Duckling

When Mrs.Mallard brought her ducklings up to visit last spring, this little one was the only one who ventured inside the patio railing. By now he or she will be all grown up and perhaps was one of the mallards that enjoyed my cracked corn recently. I am especially fond of the lavender touch that showed up on his feet when I lightened the underexposed picture.

I have Tomas Transtromer's The Great Enigma, translated by Robin Fulton on my Kindle, and because of this poem, I need to find out how many ducks (about) live on the Earth just now. I know there are more people, but the poem was written a few decades ago.


Dream Seminar

Four thousand million on Earth.
They all sleep, they all dream.
Faces throng, and bodies, in each dream--
the dreamt-of people are more numerous
than us. But take no space . . . .
You doze off at the theater perhaps,
in mid-play your eyelids sink.
A fleeting double exposure: the stage
before you outmaneuvered by a dream.
Then no more stage, it's you.
The theatre in the honest depths!
The mystery of the overworked director!
Perpetual memorizing of new plays . . .
A bedroom. Night.
The darkened sky is flowing through the room.
The book that someone fell asleep from lies
still open
sprawling wounded at the edge of the bed.
The sleeper's eyes are moving,
they're following the text without letters
in another book--
illuminated, old-fashioned, swift.
A dizzying commedia inscribed
within the eyelids' monastery walls.
A unique copy. Here, this very moment.
In the morning, wiped out.
The mystery of the great waste!
Annihilation. As when suspicious men
in uniforms stop the tourist--
open his camera, unwind the film
and let the daylight kill the picture:
thus dreams are blackened by the light of day.
Annihilated or just invisible?
There is a kind of out-of-sight dreaming
that never stops. Light for other eyes.
A zone where creeping thoughts learn to walk
Faces and forms regrouped.
We're moving on a street, among people
in blazing sun.
But just as many--maybe more--
we don't see
are in dark buildings,
high on both sides.
Sometimes one of them comes to the window
and glances down on us.

--Tomas Transtromer

I love the imaginative and surprising, yet clear, leaps in this poem! I love the Transtromer imagination! I like the varied line-lengths, too. It makes me wish again that I knew Swedish!