If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock
how else would eternity
find its way around
Translated from the Danish by Susannah Nied
It has sometimes been observed that when a teacher or lecturer says "it is clear that . . ." the words are a clue that what has been asserted is very difficult to argue for or explain. And so I was drawn to that phrase in this poem by Christensen -- found in the May 2009 issue of POETRY ; it and several other of her poems may be found here at the Poetry Foundation website.
I first became familiar with this fine Danish poet through her book-length poem, alphabet (New Directions, 2000) in which the numbers of lines in stanzas follow the sequence of Fibonacci numbers. Also, a selection from alphabet appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, (A K Peters, 2008).
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