Hour of the Puppets

“We’re surrounded by different realities, one on top of the other…Even the smallest pebble has a life of its own.”
—Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander

Touch the color on the inside
of night, Alexander. It is neither
the dark nor what you make of it.

The door to the red cabinet
hides the shadow-silk of dreams,
what you wish you did not fear.

God is not a puppet in sandals
and a flowing scroll of robes.
God is a candle snuffed by God.

When you see the puppet of God,
do not think, This is the end of me.
Think, This is the burning beginning.

The Little World

“Who is that terrifying white figure who is floating on the moonbeams and drawing near my bed?”
—Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander

Like fog on wet winter mornings
a ghost will linger as white wisps
of chill, small belling notes,
faint tingle from the night piano.

Alexander, you guessed his end,
your father in his world within worlds,
the magic lantern’s kerosene
burning panic into shrill silence.

Like feathers falling from pillows
or snow on an Uppsala street,
horses’ muffled clomping to carry
the duties of day unto death—

where will he go now? how rest?
His soul snuffed like candelabra
or tapers tucked into spruce boughs.
How can you close your eyes?

Perhaps a Violence

“Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream into each other, boundlessly and magnificently…”
—Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander

Perhaps the body is weaker
than a rose, and briefer, born
to petals of fire. Perhaps, unwittingly,
we make each other burn, thorns

in our minds like what climbs
and cuts the stalk of revelation—
we are seen, for once, as we are:
a raw, red wound, a severance.

Perhaps touch can be force:
arms around your bare chest, pressing,
and you unable to move or sound
more than a whimper. And the flame

of thought catches on bedclothes,
as you stare into midnight’s blue hue,
become a spell cast, become a tossed
pebble’s rings on deep lake, widening.

What Is Left Unexplained

“Anything is possible. Anything can happen. On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins out, building and weaving new patterns.”
—August Strindberg, quoted by Ingmar Bergman in Fanny and Alexander

Alexander, you lean against your grandmother
on a sofa in spring of a difficult year.
It is dawn, a soft light seeping through

pea green curtains and speaking of tendrils
and tiniest uncurlings of leaves, lilac time—
time to welcome into the little world the new.

Everyone is tired now. No one has slept.
Your grandmother reads aloud from A Dream Play,
and something in you knows it is true:

there are things in this strange universe
you will never understand, though you have
dreamt them alive already, all the cosmos inside you.