"Nooteboom began writing the poems in this collection in a pre-coronavirus era and finished them amid 'the mysterious virus that is suddenly ruling the world'. . . .While life unravels like a virus, with no clear endpoint or destination, the poems in this collection are a reminder of poetry’s capacity to give order to chaos. . ."

The end of the end, the man in the winter garden Asked himself, what could that be? If nothing else, he thought, not any kind of sorrow. He looked outside and saw a cloud that looked   Like a cloud, as grey as lead, too heavy For every balance, the bare fig against the wall With the thousand-year-old stones, The geese next door, their disapproval,   The way the night needed to be set right, The grammar of expropriation, nobody Themselves anymore, not a single apparition, Withdrawal after defeat   But no destination.     He'd seen that in the war, defeated soldiers In retreat, frightened, dirty, the mouths That sang so heartily when they marched in Now closed. They had sung of triumph,   Their tiny lives had suddenly expanded, Fitted with new futures, victims, others To maltreat, the back of the mirror, Now turned again, the fate of destiny.   He remembered it well, the humbled back She saw again now. He was no army but felt The lesson like a rabbit feels the hunter’s blow, Imposed without mercy and   All over.   The war that never stopped coming back, A guest who’s known to all, a toothless Kiss, the language of intimate betrayal Around him now again, remembering a past   He couldn’t share with anyone. His father, A man in a dinner suit leaning on the railing Of the boulevard, his mother alongside the future Deceased, already wrapped in the time to come,   And he himself still hidden, the world a cloud Without rules, and behind his parents the sea, The warning no one wanted to hear, always The same, the sound of indrawn breath,   Devouring so much.