Rereading Transtromer's "The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems"

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In a moment of concentration I succeeded in catching the hen, I stood with it in my hands. Curiously, it did not feel properly alive: stiff, dry, an old white feather-trimmed woman’s hat, which cried out truths from 1912. Thunder hung in the air. From the wooden plank, a scent rose as when you open a photo album so aged that you can no longer identify the portraits. I carried the hen into the enclosure and let her go. Suddenly she was very much alive, knew where she was, and ran according to the rules. The hen-yard is full of taboos. But the earth around is full of love and tenacity. A low stone wall half overgrown with greenery. As dusk falls the stones begin to gleam faintly with the hundred-year-old warmth of the hands that shaped them. The winter has been hard, but now summer is here and the earth wants to have us upright. Free but wary, as when you stand up in a slim boat. A memory of Africa is wakened in me: on the shore at Chari, many boats, a very friendly atmosphere, the almost blue-black people with three parallel scars on each cheek (the Sara tribe). I am welcomed aboard—a canoe of dark wood. It is surprisingly rickety, even when I squat. A balancing act. If the heart lies on the left side you must incline your head a little to the right, nothing in the pockets, no large gestures, all rhetoric must be left behind. Just this: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out on the water.