Face to Face
By Tomas Tranströmer, Translated by Robin Fulton

In February living stood still. 
The birds flew unwillingly and the soul
chafed against the landscape as a boat
chafes against the pier it lies moored to. 

The trees stood with their backs turned towards me.
The deep snow was measured with dead straws. 
The footprints grew old out on the crust. 
Under a tarpaulin language pined. 

One day something came to the window. 
Work was dropped, I looked up. 
The colors flared. Everything turned round. 
The earth and I sprang towards each other. 

I found this poem through poet Chelsea Dingman's Twitter (she frequently tweets good poems). Dingman attributes the translation to Robert Hass, but I found a convincing number of sources via Google who assign the translation to Fulton. Probably the poem is from this collection of the poet's work in translation, which was edited by Hass. Tomas Tranströmer is a famous Swedish poet (1931-2015). I find this cool because I don't know any Swedish poems or poets. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.