Adoration of Inflation
There are no people inside
this hotel except those who can make
a certain kind of music with their eyes
shut and my mother
who is not a person anymore
but who can still emit a kind of music
from the soil and from her honey
comb eyes inside my eyelids.
Inside my velvet dream I’m not
a person either but more
of a saboteur who loves images
translated hummingbirdishly
on lilacked mornings. I translate
an old poem about Spain
from the point of view of a knife blade
and a new poem about police
violence and nectarines
from the viewpoint of a lynx
and when I’m finished I down a glass
of champagne, a glass of glass,
a glass of heavenly grief
while wearing the ermine fur
my mother stole
because she was cold
and the world was cold
inside the blade of a sharp
almost biblically ornate knife.
That was the twentieth century
and the suits I wore back then
belonged to Orpheus.
The one I wear now
belongs to millionaires
and I’m cold while my decoys
behave symbolically in the street.
They wear blackeyed susans
inside their hearts. A caterpillar crawls
along the side of my white throat.
And though I wear a suit that belongs
to millionaires and a mask
that belongs in the most outdated way
to this elementary hotel, I am cold.
I’ve botched it. The drinking.
The paradise. The mask. My daughter
is insane. I tell anybody who wants
to listen to a man shouting inside
a hotel room while wearing a beautiful
suit that I’m surrounded by snakes.
I’m surrounded by snakes.
By mothers. By daughters who draw
angels on their phones. By questions
of economics. Like, is the body
always the site of violence? Is the spirit
always the site of value? Why are so many
people dying this spring? Why is my mom
dead? Why is Alice?
The elementary particles circulate
through my body
and through my mother
like money
or like the champagne
I’m downing while using a silk screen
to stage a protest against
my mother’s death. On the silk screens
I can see the violence. I can see
that I’m in my elements
when I can see honey everyone wants
to sell. I draw a picture
with the blade of a knife I stole
from my mother. I draw a child. A human
child that looks like a lynx
on my skin. I take another swig of
champagne. The doors are opening.
The grief is cold inside
my blood cells. It’s a cold autumn
and it is getting colder
every time I write a poem
with my blade from Spain
about the money that suddenly is worth
so little because there is so much
of it. In my sugar book
which I wrote with sugar burns
about the erotic drive
the garbage drive
I prophesied about the current crisis.
In the current crisis
I can’t help but wear a fur
stolen from the wars of the twentieth century
and it fails to warm me
it fails to warn me
about the state
of terror that I’m in or about the words
that like the champagne in my blood
mean more and more
like money
Johannes Göransson is the author of ten books of poetry and criticism, as well as the translator of poets like Aase Berg, Helena Boberg and Ann Jäderlund. He edits Action Books and Notre Dame Review, and teaches at the University of Notre Dame. This poem is from the forthcoming book The Adorations (Black Ocean, spring 2027).