Victor Man: The Absence That We Are

Silently the child dwelled in nocturnal cave listening in the blue wave of the spring to the ringing of a radiant flower. And the pale figure of the mother stepped out of the decayed wall and sleepwalking she carried the one born into pain in slumbering hands to the garden. And the stars were drops of blood shimmering in the bleak branches of the old tree and they fell in the nocturnal one’s course cloth of hair, and the boy quietly lifted the purple eyelids, the silver forehead sighing in the night wind. 
 
Wakening in the evening garden in the quiet shadow of the father, o how frightened this radiant head suffering in blue coolness and the silence in autumn rooms. A golden boat the sun sank at the lonely hill and the earnest treetops fall quiet overhead. Silently the slumbering countenance of the sister encounters in moist 
blueness, buried in her scarlet-colored hair. Blackish the night followed the other one. 
 
What forces to stand so silently on the decayed spiral staircase in the house of the fathers and the flickering candlestick dies in slender hands. Hour of lonely sinisterness, mute awakening in the hallway in the sallow web of the moon. O the smile of evil sad and cold, so that the sleeping woman’s rosy cheek pales. In showers a black linen veiled the window. And a flame jumped out of the other one’s heart and it burned silverly in darkness, a singing star. Silently childhood’s crystalline paths sank in the garden.*

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR 
DARKNESS? 
UNSEEING EYES 
ALLSEEING EYES THAT 
FOLLOW YOU 
AROUND THE ROOM 
BLUE AND GREEN 
 
NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE 
INNER EXILE 
NOON ON THE MOON 
THE STILLNESS OF THEIR 
FACES 
AS FORBIDDEN DESIRES 
RUN THROUGH THEIR 
VEINS 
THERE’S A FRONT AND 
A BACK 
AN UP AND A DOWN 
TRY NOT TO MIX THEM UP

—”What Color is Your Darkness?” by Karl Holmqvist, 2025 
 
 
 
 
* “Memory“ (Fragment) [Version 1 of “Metamorphosis of Evil”] —Georg Trakl (1887–1914)