By The Way

Death turns us into a spot.
The spot where the man was: the body

(how the hairs of your neck, how,
how etc.) that forgot itself

on the stones of that street, in that town.
Later, it is night, there’s a playground

(we: shoulder to shoulder, unhurried,
the degree of a friendship more silent now) I’m still asking

have things memory? Point to a couple
of all the tiles that lie there.

Little stone coffins. Lacking memory,
they just lie there, I say, they’re not this,

not here, not side by side. Nothing.
It’s silent where I’m standing. Later too.

It’s this: in the street, no, anywhere:
what makes a spot no spot can know.

[‘Tussen twee haakjes’, from ‘Hier is de tijd’, De Arbeiderspers 1998]
Tr: James Brockway and Esther Jansma1998

Translator’s note: Herman de Coninck, a prominent contemporary Flemish poet, when on tour abroad with other Dutch and Flemish poets, died suddenly of a heart attack, in 1997.