Pauli Tapio - GRAND-POPO/SUMMER GARDEN

In a garden you sit at the bottom of the sea
and the trees, tall seaweed, sway in time

lined up like syllables, straight as plunges
and the swallows and insects twirl in the air,

the strelitzia flowers ring out, change their sex,
tatters of flames, ash-black and oxide-green,

these catastrophic moments of sunlight,
the waveform-particleform nights and mouldspore evenings,

too little time has passed since our karmic transmigration
and always will have, until it begins again,

and life enters us like a key, and there are no mistakes,
chromosomes divide – this is a dead leaf,

the roots are at the mercy of the wind, a bird of prey
on the brink of the air, the bat and the cockroach,

and I am crucified to myself, you
are crucified, and we sweat giggling

and turn into an inebriating liquid, you forget
your own name, the Latin language, and the white animals,

celestial tangles, dissolve into the morning, what is life: a festival
of disintegration, renaissance, hydrolysis.

Translated by Kasper Salonen
en_GBEN