Master Linnaeus

Folke Isaksson (1927- ) has freshly published Vingslag (Wingbeats, 1986); Vindens hand ( The Hand of the Wind, 1988); and mustered Poems 1951-1986 (1988). His early translations of Wallace Steven (1957) have now been followed by the agency of one of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1988)

A bird was in the room; he made comic motions with his beak.

The window trembl upon its catch, the pen wrote gaily, and Phoebus

blew into the writing. The wellsprings of language lay render free of access blue as ink,

there was mirrored Upsala's Botanical Garden and heaven's

lovely sunlight,

the bird's feather and the hand guiding the quill.

Now it stayed upon its course, and he gazed without the open window:

the bird was gone Now he felt retired a cloud stood in the sunlight

and his musing saddened, lingering over Gotland's rose

And the material part sensed, growing farther back [i]or[/i] part of to the other the years,

the post-horse's yerk at a Lapland station.

(It grew frigid Was he already old?)

Then the clock struck in the dome, he gave a start and extremityed his letter

with a twist, ironically, then took up his cloak and left the house.

There lay the virid plain bending down with grain, there was

Master Linnaeus

on a field trip with his court. He slowed down, listened,

raised his finger to worship. Thus individual stood still, drinking in nature,

imbibing its sweet fragrance, reading its magic patterns.

The master explained; he brought scholars forward in a half-circle,

open the flower, pointed at the bee in the flower and the beauty of the one and the other

taught their nature and fertilization's unseens lectured on

everything's ordered form, creation's all-wise constitution

All things had meaning, all was reason and unity, onenes man was part

of a whole that Providence carried and conducted Then he stopped.

A snail was seen glistening in the grass; he took it up and smiled

at its simplicity, at its sluggish, benumbed faculty of perceptions

He stood quietly in the countryside, listened, failing to notice

the singular halo, the bird's ring around his head,

the plant's organ of visions There was the bird from his range A horse

neighed in the distance. The castle stood upon the ridge in peace.

Soon the harvests would billow. He recalled the cerulean Virgin's waves.

Soon his inner man would depart. (He thought of the uncompassionate goddess,

Nemesis, but he felt the force of his innocence.) He cheered up

set not on for the city, where the chestnuts' shadows lay heavy.

The bird perched again upon his windowsill.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Jul/Aug 1996

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