Electric Verses

Etusivu : Welcome to Electric Verses! : Claes Andersson

Claes Andersson

Claes Andersson

When you’re dead…

When you’re dead you’ll get to do everything you didn’t have time
to do while you were alive.
You’ll finally have time to yourself, you must promise
to become very selfish.
I see before me: ”Don’t think I intend just to sit
here and rot.”
Finally you get to tell the president and the minister of defense
what you think of them.
Not to mention your wife, who ”stole your life.”
You’ll be free as the gull you loved to watch
through the window of the sauna.
You’ll circle the globe and visit other exotic
places.
For God’s sake, marry the miller’s daughter, that was
always your secret wish.
You’ve begun your elocution lessons by correspondence, your
mouth full of stones like the great masters.
Toward fall you’ll compose a tring quartet for grass fire,
night frost, compost and sunset.
Like Wittgenstein you will learn to whistle all Schubert’s
lieder and symphonies except Alte Kameraden.

From Dikter från havets botten, 1993. Translated from the Swedish by Rika Lesser.

  • When you’re dead…
  • Like the Shore We Practice Speaking
  • Who was he that…
  • All night we talked about death
  • Talk in the night on the porch
  • When I was born
  • Andersson
  • The New Theology
  • Mutters to himself
  • Roommates
  • When a person goes to pieces
  • Elementary statuology
  • Grandmother Was Hairy and Ironic
  • As If Nothing Happened