WHAT I REMEMBER

I ask myself what will they remember when I am gone 

or when they are grown and cradling the hurts of their own childhood.

I wonder which pieces of this magnificent, messy effort will be worthy of recall

and which will fall by the wayside, detritus of days lived in the sunset

colours of our love for them. I know that much, if not most, will be packed away

in the recesses of what I hope they think of as a happy childhood.

Will moving be one of the sharp shards they carry gingerly? Angrily?

Perhaps tenderly? Will they demand explanation and reasons

for the wanderings of my heart? Will I have any?

- Hillary Bowen, A Home

This piece of writing rings in me as his laughter echoes between the pavilions.
I don't remember learning to ride a bicycle. As I think of it now, I can't
remember cycling at all as a child, even if of course I know I did.
To me much, if not most, is packed away in recesses of what I think of as a,
if not happy, then beautiful, - childhood.

What I remember is my mother's stunning feet. Bronzed and
glittering between the water's surface and the jetty, they were
my benchmark in the lake where I learnt how to swim.
The one which held sway to blood-red water lilies and pappa's
tortoiseshell glasses forever lost from a rowing boat.

What I remember is the light over the lake.

What I remember is pappa angling over me, blotting out the light,
where I lay on the asphalt after having fallen backwards from a truck.
I remember how he lifted me up and carried me laying over and in his arms,
up to the still empty apartment, where we were helping a friend move in.
I remember my body against the aged parquet flooring and that I felt,
just the way it used to look like it felt when a contused cartoon character
developed as if a halo of chirping birds and flickering stars
circling in a delirious dance around their head.

I don't remember us ever visiting that flat again.

I remember it as the summer I then spent laying under white sheets
hung like a veillike nordic bedouin tent between the appletrees, resting after
my cyclopean concussion. What I remember is the tree's shadows caressing
the linen, how they arched over me like nurses on guard.

What I remember is the gargantuan Giant Hogweeds skirting the railway.
I remember their flowers being so alluringly airy, in dainty white
against the gloomy dark tracks. And I remember them standing there
seductively; dressed in mamma and pappa's premonitions.
'Bear hogweed'. Poison. Burns.

I don't remember any cautions about the trains
that roared passed there through our parts of the woods.
Every Giant Hogweed was a storm bird, a rumble in themselves.

It was the time when we lived in that vast
turn of the century house with a round, budding tower room and
almost too many other rooms to hide in; to disappear in.
The ageing beauty had several staircases, with dark wooden bannisters
worn to soft perfection by the hands and the years moving by,
much too tempting to resist straddling and sliding down.

Once, there was a large brown bear rug with a mounted head,
thrown sprawling in an open skip in the neighbour's driveway.
Its jaws were open in a now forever soundless growl and its eyes
blind by glass. We saw it from where we were laying on our bellies,
up on our sun-warmed garage roof eating sticky plums
scattered there with us from nearby branches.
'Bear Hogweed'. Damnation. Brownbear.

I remember it as an instantaneous sensation,
invisible but dense and my very first, - suspicion that man is
more dangerous than any speeding train or toxic flower.

What is it that you remember..?









∞
cassius's first bicycle is from banwood
(i wonder if he'll remember learning to ride a bike.)

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THE MOON TAROT

'The harmony of change shows you that opposites

can alternate without clashing.

Resistance will only prolong your healing and growth.

Allow the duality of life to unfold and cycle through.'


I almost skim past the words but hesitate.
Harmony..? My change feels more like disharmony.
My mood is unsettled and sombre.
I feel restless & listless at the very same time.
Perhaps contradictions can sway without discord.
I like to think so. But Harmony. Her, this I thought of
only last night, I've forgotten the face of.

I've put the large noise-cancelling headphones on.
I must get to think my thoughts to their end on my own.
The cushions are made of nougat coloured leather, finally worn
soft by momentarily needing to expel the everyday murmurs.
Now they play Gustavo Santaolalla on high volume straight into me,
and I am propelled back to my Blueberry Nights.
Tears pulse down my cheeks. Stops at corners of the mouth and
abandoned arms, as a ray of sunlight vehemently insists on
blinding me through cleavage in the curtain.
I've just cursed it, and that in itself strike me.

To curse a ray of light. Let go, Hannah.

Resistance will only prolong your healing and growth.

Allow the duality of life to unfold and cycle through.'

∞

the moon tarot was read here

work for our Lemholt N' Bergman (part of LINES)
self-portrait with hand-drawn lines by Bergman

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GROWING PAINS

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing

that we don't even recognize that growth is happening...

Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting,

holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be,

eventually become the periods we wait for,

for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared

for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability,

a new level of the personality is about to be revealed."

- 'Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987'

by Alice Walker

I've got growing pains. Silence and growing pains.

Or I brace myself with that's what I've got because it agrees so altogether

with the words of one of my household gods, Alice Walker. 

I think it like a prayer, that this time that feels so confusing

in effect is a time of growth disguised. Please let it be so.

It is his little body growing suddenly so fast it feels like we

should be able to hear it, but for him, everything is barefaced yet. 

It is me who aches and have one thousand and one nights of questions.

It is me who folds corners in one book after the other about being a

mother and craving to write, and every other one about being a

woman and taking up space. The late evenings are mine.

And the words. The words of the others. And those within that

swell me so, but refuses to come to the surface so

that I can look them in the eye.

One morning when we lay slumbery and study each other he says I

smell like butterfly milk. I write that down a bit later in a 'Cassius Says' notebook,

mark the date next to it. I think to myself then that I've become too much library

and too little poetry, too much laundry basket and too little nudity,

too much stain remover and too little dance moves.

Then I think I'm always so quick to be hard on myself.

And I think that I know this place and I've been here before, only at

another age. Been in growth or in waiting at least,

and instead felt like if utterly lost.

This is a reminder that even if I am uncertain of the future I'll want to be

more poetry (it'll have to be whatever it is) and nude more often.

There's a generous mirror that was left to hang in this flat from the

previous inhabitant. Every now and then when I'm home alone I drag

Cassius's clothes rail away from in front of it, let my dressing gown fall

to the floor and stand there naked, downright and without demeanour.

I can think to myself then, nowadays, that it is beautiful how it

has changed. The belly that has a softer roundness after carrying him,

the breasts that have more density in their drops, my shoulders and

the collarbone that bridge them that's always been strong.  

I push them back then and stand straight. In the light.

And I can think to myself now when I put this into words, that

right there is something that has come to the surface to look me in the eye.

That the writer, the woman, and the lover in me doesn't have to

be dormant in the mother's shadow. I am right here.

∞

kids malawi chair from this beautiful place
linen shell pillow by tamar mogendorff
large muslin swaddle from bonét et bonét
| selfportrait |
cassius is wearing linen trousers from mingo kids
toy furniture for pretend friends by stuül

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THEN, WHAT DO YOU DREAM OF?

Inside of the condensed darkness when the others have fallen asleep is when I think the best.

That's when the words come to me in clarity and complete form. Torrential, thorough.

So, if this, for now, is my Room of One's Own I arrange, anew, the little table on my side

of the bed, as that morning's first tea cools. I stack books & notebooks and place a

candle close; a flame for the night, draw an unstudied loop from faint scrape to firm dark

that assures the pen is spirited. I leaf through the pages of the most beautiful of the notebooks,

the linen-covered hefty one that I believe to be empty but for 500 pages waiting.

Only then do I see it's got dark plum purple batik-like stains overflowing

its edges and on the flyleaf, it's written in graphite

Cassius Lemholt Violaris 
gave birth to this book on 11 / 05 / 19
by spilling red wine all over mamma's book.

The wine delicious.
The flavour of the mood bitter.

Papa
x


p.s 


the Candy Boxing Monkey Saga

Cassius - But you're a toy..!
Monkey a.k.a Papa - Yes. But I have a life.
Cassius - Oh. Okey. Then, what do you dream of..?

You know how you know the handwriting of a loved one.
(His letters have the softest edges but follow no rules of capital or lowercase.)
I hold the book, weigh it. I think of how different our together is now.
How we've also deepened into each other, us two. Somewhere among the days
since him, we've become accomplices in the unspoken,
- the sensuality in the gaps when he's asleep, to make love there;
the glances of fear when he's hurt himself, and we're yet to know how badly;
the poorly disguised pleasure of huddling in the bathtub that really is too small for three bodies;
 the significance of the hand stretched out to hold the other's under the covers
when he has entrenched himself in the middle and in between;
the smiling eyes that meet at the sidewalk when he yells
Thank You..! Byeeee..! to yet another bus driver;
the pure joy when he answers that his favourite day of the nursery week
is the one where they go visit the old people in the nursing home down the street;
how the other's voice drops and descends, to disappear like honey
into the night alongside Winnie the Pooh.

And you know how you know when you've found the core.
How you can almost touch an insight once it's finally landed in you.
How obvious it suddenly is.
It's here I have to start. It's because of this I have to start over.
This is where my new narrative comes into existence.
I'm going to fill the most beautiful notebook.






∞

monkey in its own kimono
she delivers flowers by bike in our city
chocolate-coloured cashmere

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PRESENCE AND SILENCE HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER

'I've been thinking about something for a long time,

and I keep noticing that most human speech - if not all human speech -

is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about

presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are

filled with nutrients and nourishment. 

Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush;

our bones get harder, they get compacted. Our muscles get

toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in.

The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak.

So presence and silence have something to do with each other.'

/ Li-Young Lee

I'm here, even if one might not think so.
Somehow I am always writing, even when I am not.
I buy pencils and a long, sand-coloured silk nightdress that
I never even try on. The silkiness is smoother suspended from
a hanger on the wardrobe door and I can't reject what is
never written down.

I read instead, others that get the words right, inside of books.
I observe instead, others that look beautiful in silk, in posted photos.
And I think to myself that that's more than a little bit sad.
That it is as if I'm holding my breath. I neither breathe out
kind of with purpose nor take breaths in deep enough.
I think to myself that I want to take up space, in my way, like me.
I want to tell the poet that in fact there is a word, one that
we sometimes say in a surely singular way in Swedish,
at the very same time as we breathe in.

YES.

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ROOM FOR YOU

My life is nothing but room for you, I said.

-

The words from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night
has been following me around for weeks.
The book is not at all about motherhood, but the sentence
My life is nothing but room for you resonates deeply in me and
feels like it says it all, with only a few words, about being a mother.

He who turned out to be Cassius lived behind my ribcage and so far
remains the only one who's heard my heart beating from the inside.
I had insane morning sickness all hours of the day for three months
and that was followed by a virus. Pityriasis Rosea.
Also, roughly Mountain ridge Rose in my mother tongue.
Sounds like a serene coolheaded flower, but it put my skin on fire.
I held my fists clenched for months not to scratch and
counted down the weeks that was estimated left for the
venomously red roses to bloom on pale winter skin;
from delicate collarbone to hips slowly widening, in his name.

He came to us on a Sunday, in a room cloud high.
Rain hung there, it was all a swollen grey coulisses right
outside the large windows where candles burned still,
for what felt like infinity. Seagulls flew in circles and I floated.

Floated on my back in the warm, still water as if
it could go on infinitely through the waves of pain and illusiveness.
Floated with my left fist clenched around my fiance's hands and
my right around my sister's.
My own mother's words along my spine;

You have to be able to float, Hannah.
Swimming is good too..
but most of all you have to be able to float.
To float is to surrender. Float first. Then love.
That's what she said. One cannot exist without the other.

Now we share a room. A spacious one that opens on to backyards,
winding old fire-escapes and our wild little garden.
We have our large bed and his small one.
I turn the generous paper lamp on in the evenings.
It's got the wrong switch and needs an extra plug and this
makes its light flicker as if were it a giant lit candle.
Christian reads Winnie the Pooh with that voice I fell for
before we had even met and we all slumber together, close.
Only later do we lift Cassius over to his bed and pull the baldachin
around him, his little bed and around sleep itself (as if its own being).

I have no doubts where nothing hurts.
That's my most safe room as a mother. That I don't
think much about how things are 'supposed to be', or
how others do it, as long as it works for us.
As long as it stays afloat.
Lovemaking there's always room for.

My calm I think is his most safe room.
My melancholy, my worry, that I try to be honest about,
as long as he asks or listens. He's afraid of the dark.
We walk slowly through the long hallway after brushing our teeth.
I hold him and we don't turn any of the lights on.
His face is close to mine when I say that these are the
same rooms, just without the light.

My life is nothing but room for you.

The space he occupies can never be reclaimed.
Not when he's away either. My worry is in that, the sadness
of missing space, that there's not really time for it all.
That I can't quite find the way back to the rooms of my own.
Something tells me though, just as I put it into words,
that it's the word and thought of back to that has to go.

I can't go back. I can only try to create new room
inside of the life we have now. It will have to be in a home
a bit more worn, be in between wider hips,
eyes more tired and sentences only semifinished.
I had to listen to myself. It's the same rooms.
Just in a different light.

I think to myself that that's what it's like with the biggest,
enduring loves of our lives. They occupy all rooms and we are
never again the same as before. And then all is as it shall.






∞

i have a collaboration with danish brand bonét et bonét
{i do those types of collabs exclusively when i really like a brand
and solely with pieces i love and otherwise wouldäve bought}
cassius's rattan bed, bedding and canopy is from them
| the various shell pillows are by the amazing tamar mogendorff
| the brown pyjama is from soor ploom
| knits and all other clothing is by bonét et bonét

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