December Evening 1972

Here I come, the invisible man, perhaps employed
by a Great Memory to live right now. And I am driving past

The locked-up white church—a wooden saint stands
smiling, helpless, as if they had taken away his glasses.

He is alone. Everything else is now, now, now. The law of gravity presses
                us
against our work by day and against our beds by night. The war.

-from ‘the great enigma’ new collected poems of
Tomas Transtromer (2011 Nobel Prize winner)

translated by Robin Fulton