I grow sleepy during the car journey and I drive in under the trees at the side of the road. I curl up in the back seat and sleep. For how long? Hours. Darkness had come on.
Suddenly I'm awake and don't know where I am. Wide-awake, but it doesn't help. Where am I ? WHO am I ? I am something that wakens in a back seat, twists about in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?
At last my life returns. My name comes like an angel. Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora overture) and the rescuing footsteps come smartly down the overlong stairway. It is it ! It is it !
But impossible to forget the fifteen second stuggle in the hell of oblivion, a few metres from the main road, where the traffic glides past with its lights on.
Tomas Transtromer in New Collected Poems (2011)
