What Hums Along My Path

Tucked inside a folder called Isfuglens Land — which itself is nearly empty, just this poem and a draft about Danish history — there’s a love poem called “Hvad er det der summer på min vej?” It asks its question right up front: what is it that hums along my path, every time I walk hand in hand with you?

Er det mon humlebi’r og sommerfugle Der laver ekko i en hem’lig hule, Som kun kan kaldes hid af dig og mig?

Bumblebees and butterflies making echoes in a secret cave that only the two of them can summon. That image is doing something unusual — it takes a feeling everyone has had (walking with someone and the world feeling different) and gives it an almost fairy-tale mechanism. There’s a place being created by the walking together, a resonance chamber that exists only because both of them are there.

The poem moves in five-line stanzas with an AABBA rhyme scheme — the same structure as a limerick, which is a risky choice for a love poem. But it never tips into comedy. The rhymes feel song-like instead, almost folk-vise, and the rhythm carries you forward with the walking. Two leaves drift down and separate when they land in her hair. He wants to forget about “tid tilbage” — time remaining — and just float for a few more days, hoping time stands still.

Then comes the image that stopped me:

For hvis vi stopper nu, vil vi nok vælte Som to på tandem-cykel, uden hjelme Der håber på at lande i et bed.

A tandem bicycle without helmets. If they stop, they’ll topple over and hope to land in a flower bed. It’s goofy and tender and exactly right. The whole physics of early love is in that metaphor — the momentum is what keeps it upright, stopping is the dangerous part, and neither of them has any protection. The “håber på at lande i et bed” has a double meaning too (flower bed, bed), and the poem doesn’t wink at it. It just lets it sit there.

The ending is where the craft really shows:

Og mens vi si’r farvel, ved amors låge Mødes vi på ny, i afskedståge. Hvad er det mon der summer på min vej?

“Afskedståge” — farewell-fog. A compound word that might be invented. They say goodbye at amor’s gate (her front door, recast as something mythic), and they meet again inside the goodbye, in the fog of parting. The opening question returns as the closing line, making the whole poem circular — the walk ends where it began, which is the nature of the feeling itself. You say goodbye and immediately start wondering when you’ll walk again.

Below the finished poem, the file is full of discarded drafts and alternative lines — “Vi ser to blade flette sig i fald,” “Vi ser to blade og de følges ad” — and then, unexpectedly, a transcription of Ludvig Holstein’s classic “Det er i dag et vejr.” He was studying the old Danish song tradition while writing this, absorbing its rhythms, its way of turning simple outdoor observations into declarations of feeling.

What strikes me about Christian here: he has an instinct for the slightly absurd image that turns out to be the truest one. A tandem bicycle without helmets isn’t “poetic” in any conventional sense, but it captures something about vulnerability and momentum that a more careful metaphor would miss. He trusts the weird image. That’s a rare instinct — most writers would edit the bicycle out and put in something about the wind.