The wind blows high above.
Below, under the birch trees and the raspberry canes
the dusk grows gradually
from which anonymous birds
launch into flight
and disappear into the thicket.
The summer builds, in the timber frame,
a multistoreyed postmodern house
whose inhabitants
do not really know one another.
Seldom does he who lives under the tussock
meet the resident of the tree top.
The ecological thread
which binds everything to everything else
is too long
and too fine.
You come here – you are a stranger.
Here, different laws and relationships hold good.
We may have christened them, but that does not concern them,
they do not know it.
Linnaea borealis knows nothing of Carolus Linnaeus.
It just grows.
Three pine trees, grown together.
You lean against one of them – the trunk is still warm.
The cooling of the air has not yet reached them,
although the stones are already chilled.
A pile of stones.
Slowly covered by twigs, leaves and moss, until all that is left of it is a mound.
Each stone has its own face, its own colour.
Perhaps they have names and personalities, too, but they are so slow.
Perhaps 11,000 years – about how long it is since the retreating glacier left them here – is not enough for them to gain a clear idea of their identity, to realise their own individuality, their separation from the grey womb of the Northlands from which they were once pulled forth.
We may say we are one with creation, but do we really understand what it means.
We are intruders here, we are very far from those who are at home here.
Like the wood horsetail, which spreads its soft sunshade over the rotting leaves.
Like the wood sorrel, whose flowers are as sour as its leaves.
Like the bilberry, which by springtime has forgotten everything, whose young naïve sprigs are full of optimism and curiosity.
Like the lingonberry – dark and solemn, Juhan Liiv-like, Paul-Eerik Rummo-like, which remembers everything and dares not rise too high,
the lingonberry, the real master, who moves to the forest when the forest is ready.
But Linnaea, the twinflower, has begun to move.
I guessed it long ago, I noticed it first.
The twinflower is enlarging its territory, it advances about half a metre a year.
Perhaps its speed will gradually grow – I do not know.
In any case, it has plenty of time, and it will be difficult for anyone to try to keep it from advancing.
I believe it intends to conquer the whole world – which perhaps does indeed belong to it.
For a couple of days we all ate young spruce tips, so that our mouths became tender.
And so the summer is at hand.
On the road, by the ditch, a couple of burnt stones from our sauna have crumbled to sand.
On the path grow rushes: a couple of patches of dark, stiff green – like pieces of old horsehair mattress.
At the edge of the forest, in the middle of a footpath, a solitary strawberry blooms, its flower turned towards the south, towards the sun and the open country.
In the dike a stream murmurs and grows spring moss.
Around the forked birch is grass, full of cowslips, like brass key-blanks in a locksmith’s drawer.
Which is the true key of the sky?
Blue moor grass and bird’s-eye primroses together, as if they were well acquainted with the work of Lippmaa and others on plant association in Estonia.
Amid the ruins of a hay barn between the nettles and the meadowsweet, a solitary dandelion blooms, this year for the first time.
Beauty scratches, like a puppy at a door – when it gets out, it wants in, when it gets in, it wants out –
so that it no longer knows which side it is on,
does not know which is the most painful and essential of all,
the yearning to see it all to the core, to crawl free of oneself, to crumble to dust in all those sky-keys, bird’s-eye primroses, rushes, nettles and dandelions
or to scoop them together, whether in photographs, poems or memories, store them up, pass them on to someone who is in need of them
and feel how he begins to come alive again,
to sense the scent of young nettles and streams and the touch of the evening breeze
as I step over the river marsh towards the forest.
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