The Boat in the Evening by Tarjei Vesaas Read Free Book Online Page B

horses? Why is there no thundering of numberless hooves?
    It is death. Nobody could ride a horse made of light, surely?
    I am dying.
    And in the same instant, like a stab: Already? No, no.
    Hush, we said to the thought, but it would not obey, it went on nagging us, spoiling our great joy, trying to destroy our exhilaration and the happy impulses we were beginning to feel. Then I saw that Per was pointing like a rescuer across the sound, pointing at the girl who was standing on the rock as before, waiting as before. Everything was changed again, we were not about to die, we were alive and more than alive, we were open and ready to be filled with what was coming.
    *
    It poured on down the hillside. An unbridled dance of shining horses.
    And on that hillside.
    Ours, our hillside. There these inflaming visions were to be played out.
    The hillside—where the dew had many a time collected on my shoulders through the night, in the grass beneath trees dense with leaf, where the darkness had been fearful and enticing. The arm of the brook beside which I had sat thinking illicit, strange thoughts. And the place where the cliffs hid in the tall grasses edging them, turning the drops into terrifying pitfalls. On this hillside, where I had sat thinking until it seemed as if I had never really been there at all, the rushing wave of light swept down as runaway horses. Our wild exhilaration was sweeping along, making straight for us.
    To change us in some way?
    Irregular gleams flickered between the trees.
    Tall grasses and stiff angelica heads slapped against the horses’ dancing flanks, their gleaming flanks, it was quite beyond reason and there was no thunder of hooves, they were noiseless. Since there was no sound, our tongues were paralysed. No one could shout in that silence. No one dared to look across the sound now; we were standing stiffly to receive them.
    Thinking that now everything was different.
    We were not to die, but to be created anew, on our familiar hillside.
    *
    Before long it looked as if the whole hillside were alight—as if our wish had come true. How could we tell? We stood there in a kind of elation. Tensely we saw that the terrifying cliffs did not exist: the stampede swept straight over them and nothing happened, none of them disappeared in the pitfalls, the web of light was unbroken.
    And then:
    They are here.
    What will happen?
    Welter of thoughts
    forwards, backwards,
    the moment the stampede began,
    reached us,
    bore us up and shattered us.
    It cannot be spoken, but
    straight towards us,
    straight, straight, our desire.
    We saw no eyes,
    we saw spears of light;
    not those either, we
    were in the centre,
    lifted like down and like silk,
    at the same time it was scorching fire.
    It felt like becoming many, many out of one.
    Not like that either:
    it sped right through us,
    not stopped by our presence in the way,
    it rushed right through us
    â€”and we shone too.
    We knew now was the time, but
    time for what?
    Per, my friend, lay on the ground
    bow-shaped, and shone.
    He jumped up again, touching me
    and at once I shone.
    I told him: ‘You’re shining!’
    He called out, elated:
    â€˜Do not forget!’
    No more, made dumb,
    dumb by new currents,
    what he wished to say lost.
    He was here, out of reach.
    His severed cry floated
    up the fiery hillside, as the cloud shadows do,
    the fleeting cloud shadows on an innocent everyday.
    Do not forget? What did he mean?
    And where was I?
    Wild groping in the brain,
    and the first already long past.
    We stood mingled with new, never seen things,
    the nameless ones, and
    in the midst of commotion dear things that have names
    lovely angelica from my own hillside.
    Angelica man-tall at my side rustled
    its sunshades as if there was something important
    to tell me
    which I should fathom.
    Fathom, fathom—the generous message did not reach me
    and Per lay on the ground shining,
    no, not shining, a field of light.
    The last horses were streaming