Ninety-One

Where are you about to disappear, where are you now?
Behind what curtains are you pondering your half-sentences?
Where is your ferocity, your keen rhythm,
your intoxicating laugh disappearing?
You ask for dead people’s telephone numbers, call them
again and again, and they die again for you, multiple times,
your sister who kicked you in the trundle bed,
your brother, his slender hands
when he taught you pat-a-cake.
You’re living in a ghost movie, wandering
the strange white corridors of a ghost ship,
looking for familiar faces, finding strange people
engaged in incomprehensible tasks,
working their devices, speaking a foreign language, laughing
-- you don’t know at what.  When you lie in your bed
someone appears on the headboard,
you look at the figure upside down, it looks like a giraffe,
or is it once again that beautiful silent woman
who comes to look at you at nap time,
her gaze is frigid, no one else has seen her,
and neither would you like to see her, not yet.

From "Koko tarina," ("The Whole Story"), 2001
("Yhdeksänkymmentäyksi," p. 68)
Translated from Finnish by Anselm Hollo.