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FINLAND
Forest
and flat, wigs of lichen sewn
on
rocks, soldiers dead in the wood:
we
have a language and our own faces;
we
have a land, we hold it.
Who
else could put up with this flatness,
winter’s
white lid, the blank lakes,
forests
where paths never care to stay
and
a tongue that oozes and clucks, good for swearing in?
Could
you bear to be as slow as this?
Or
so careful that you know the place of a line,
having
studied so long, a house makes
in
a toss of trees, or the laws of glass?
When
you look at the rising halt, like a skater’s,
of
successful apartments between which play
trees
and water, at Tapiola, or the shield-
shape
of Pyynikki’s turning audience,
and
say how intelligent they are, remember
they
were got in an orphan slowness
in
which terse choices exploded
like
controlled tactics in an icy war:
and
mark what intelligence is.
We
have farm fathers who’ve had idiot sons.
We
are Europe’s provincials. The taste you find
has
a past you could not live with, hollow as bone.
Alan
Marshfield
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