If.
We are poets, which has the sound of outcast.
Nevertheless, we step out from our shores.
We dare contend for godhead, with goddesses,
and for the Virgin with the gods themselves.
3
Now what shall I do here, blind and fatherless?
Everyone else can see and has a father.
Passion in this world has to leap anathema
as it might be over the walls of a trench
and weeping is called a cold in the head.
What shall I do, by nature and trade
a singing creature (like a wire – sunburn! Siberia!)
as I go over the bridge of my enchanted
visions, that cannot be weighed, in a
world that deals only in weights and measures?
What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a
world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
with all this immensity
in a measured world?
1923
I’ll be late for the meeting
we arranged. When I arrive, my hair
will be grey. Yes, I suppose I grabbed
at spring. And you set your hopes much too high.
I shall walk with this bitterness for years
across mountains or town squares equally,
(Ophelia didn’t flinch at rue!) I’ll walk
on souls and on hands without shuddering.
Living on. As the earth continues.
With blood in every thicket, every creek.
Even though Ophelia’s face is waiting
between the grasses bordering every stream.
She gulped at love, and filled her mouth
with silt. A shaft of light on metal!
I set my love upon you. Much too high.
In the sky arrange my burial.
1923
The bed of a railway cutting
has tidy sheets. The steel-blue
parallel tracks ruled out
as neatly as staves of music.
And over them people are driven
like possessed creatures from Pushkin
whose piteous song has been silenced.
Look, they’re departing, deserting.
And yet lag behind and linger,
the note of pain always rising
higher than love, as the poles freeze
to the bank, like Lot’s wife, forever.
Despair has appointed an hour for me
(as someone arranges a marriage): then
Sappho with her voice gone
I shall weep like a simple seamstress
with a cry of passive lament –
a marsh heron! The moving train
will hoot its way over the sleepers
and slice through them like scissors.
Colours blur in my eye,
their glow a meaningless red.
All young women at times
are tempted – by such a bed!
1923
You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was a truth in every falsehood.
Your love went far beyond any possible
boundary as no one else’s could.
Your love seemed to last even longer
than time itself. Now you wave your hand –
and suddenly your love for me is over!
That is the truth in five words.
1923
It’s not like waiting for post.
This is how you wait for
the one letter you need:
soft stuff bound with
tape and paste.
Inside a little word.
That’s all. Happiness.
Waiting for happiness?
It’s more like waiting for death.
The soldiers will salute
and three chunks of lead
will slam into your chest.
Your eyes will then flash red.
No question of joy.
Too old now, all bloom gone.
Waiting for what else now but
black muzzles in a square yard.
A square letter. I think
there may be spells in the ink.
No hope. And no one is
too old to face death
or such a square envelope.
1923
My ear attends to you,
as a mother hears in her sleep.
To a feverish child, she whispers
as I bend over you.
At the skin, my blood calls out to
your heart, my whole sky craves
an island of tenderness.
My rivers tilt towards you.
And I am drawn downwards
as stairs slope into a garden,
or some willow’s bough falls
straight down, away from the milestone.
Stars are pulled to the earth
and laurels on graves won
with suffering, attract banners.
An owl longs for a hollow.
And I lean down
towards you with muscle and wing,
as if to a grave stone,
(I put the years to sleep)
my lips seek yours… like spring.
1923
As people listen intently
(a river’s mouth to its source)
that’s how they smell a flower
to the depths, till they lose all sense.
That’s how they feel their deepest
craving in dark air,
as children lying in blue sheets
peer into memory.
And that’s how a young boy feels
when his blood begins to change.
When people fall in love with love
they fling themselves in the abyss.
1923
Strong doesn’t mate with strong.
It’s not allowed in this world.
So Siegfried missed Brünnhilde,
in marriage fixed by a sword.
Like buffaloes, stone on stone,
in brotherly hatred joined,
he left their marriage bed, unknown,
she slept, unrecognised.
Apart, in the marriage bed.
Apart, in ambiguous language.
Apart, and clenched like a fist.
Too late. And apart. That’s marriage.
More ancient evil yet:
Achilles, Thetis’ son
crushing the Amazon
like a lion, missed Penthesilea.
Think of her glance, when felled
from her horse in the mud,
she looked up at him then
and not down from Olympus.
And afterwards, his passion was
to snatch his wife back from darkness?
But equal never mates with equal.
And so, we missed each other.
1924
In a world where most people
are hunched and sweaty
I know only one person
equal to me in strength.
In a world where there is
so much to want
I know only one person
equal to me in power.
In a world where mould
and ivy cover everything
I know only one person – you –
who equals me in spirit.
1924
Liebster, Dich wundert
die Rede? Alle Scheidenden
reden wie Trunkene und
nehmen sich festlich…
Hölderlin
A shudder: off my shoulders
with this mountain! My soul rises.
Now let me sing of sorrow which
is my own mountain
a blackness which I will
never block out again:
Let me sing of sorrow
from the top of the mountain!
1
A mountain, like the body of
a recruit mown down by shells,
wanting lips that were
unkissed, and a wedding ceremony
the mountain demanded those.
Instead, an ocean broke into its ears
with sudden shouts of hooray! Though
the mountain fought and struggled.
The mountain was like thunder!
A chest drummed on by Titans.
(Do you remember that last house
of the mountain – the end of the suburb?)
The mountain was many worlds!
And God took a high price for one.
Sorrow began with a mountain.
This mountain looked on the town.
2
Not Parnassus not Sinai
simply a bare and military
hill. Form up! Fire!
Why is it then in my eyes
(since it was October and not May)
that mountain was Paradise?
3
On an open hand Paradise was offered,
(if it’s too hot, don’t even touch it!)
threw itself under our feet with all
its gullies and steep crags,
with paws of Titans, with all
its shrubbery and pines
the mountain seized the skirts of our
coats, and commanded: stop.
How far from schoolbook Paradise
it was: so windy, when
the mountain pulled us down on our
backs. To itself. Saying: lie here!
The violence of that pull bewildered us.
How? Even now I don’t know.
Mountain. Pimp. For holiness.
It pointed, to say: here.
4
How to forget Persephone’s pomegranate
seed in the coldness of winter?
I remember lips half-opening to
mine, like the valves of a shell-creature
lost because of that seed, Persephone!
Continuous as the redness of lips,
and your eyelashes were like jagged points
upon the golden angles of a star.
5
Not that passion is deceitful or imaginary!
It doesn’t lie. Simply, it doesn’t last!
If only we could come into this world as though
we were common people in love
be sensible, see things as they are: this
is just a hill, just a bump in the ground.
(And yet they say it is by the pull of
an abyss, that you measure height.)
In the heaps of gorse, coloured dim
among islands of tortured pines…
(In delirium above the level of
life)
– Take me then. I’m yours.
Instead only the gentle mercies of
domesticity – chicks twittering –
because we came down into this world who
once lived at the height of heaven: in love.
6
The mountain was mourning (and mountains do mourn,
their clay is bitter, in the hours of parting).
The mountain mourned: for the tenderness
(like doves) of our undiscovered mornings.
The mountain mourned: for our friendliness, for
that unbreakable kinship of the lips.
The mountain declared that everyone will
receive in proportion to his tears.
The mountain grieved because life is a gypsy-camp,
and we go marketing all our life from heart to heart.
And this was Hagar’s grief. To be
sent far away. Even with her child.
Also the mountain said that all things were a trick
of some demon, no sense to the game.
The mountain sorrowed. And we were silent,
leaving the mountain to judge the case.
7
The mountain mourned for what is now blood
and heat will turn only to sadness.
The mountain mourned. It will not let us go.
It will not let you lie with someone else!
The mountain mourned, for what is now
world and Rome will turn only to smoke.
The mountain mourned, because we shall be with
others. (And I do not envy them!)
The mountain mourned: for the terrible load
of promises, too late for us to renounce.
The mountain mourned the ancient nature of
the Gordian knot of law and passion.
The mountain mourned for our mourning also.
For tomorrow! Not yet! Above our foreheads
will break – death’s sea of – memories!
For tomorrow, when we shall realise!
That sound what? as if someone were
crying just nearby? Can that be it?
The mountain is mourning. Because we must go down
separately, over such mud,
into life which we all know is nothing but
mob market barracks:
That sound said: all poems of
mountains are written thus
8
Hump of Atlas, groaning
Titan, this town where we
live, day in, day out, will come
to take a pride in the mountain
where we defeated life – at cards, and
insisted with passion not to
exist. Like a bear-pit.
And the twelve apostles.
Pay homage to my dark cave,
(I was a cave that the waves entered).
The last hand of the card game was
played, you remember, at the edge of the suburb?
Mountain many worlds the
gods take revenge on their own likeness!
And my grief began with this mountain
which sits above me now like my headstone.
9
Years will pass. And then the inscribed
slab will be changed for tombstone and removed.
There will be summerhouses on our mountain.
Soon it will be hemmed in with gardens,
because in outskirts like this they say
the air is better, and it’s easier to live:
so it will be cut into plots of land,
and many lines of scaffolding will cross it.
They will straighten my mountain passes.
All my ravines will be upended.
There must be people who want to bring happiness
into their home, to have happiness.
Happiness at home! Love without fiction.
Imagine: without any stretching of sinews.
I have to be a woman to endure this!
(There was happiness – when you used to come,
happiness – in my home.) Love without any extra
sweetness given by parting. Or a knife.
Now on the ruins of our happiness
a town will grow: of husbands and wives.
And in that blessed air, while
you can, everyone should sin –
soon shopkeepers on holidays
will be chewing the cud of their profits,
thinking out new levels and corridors, as
everything leads them back to their house!
For there has to be someone who needs
a roof with a stork’s nest!
10
Yet under the weight of these foundations
the mountain will not forget the game.
Though people go astray they must remember.
And the mountain has mountains of time.
Obstinate crevices and cracks remain;
in summer homes, they’ll realise, too late,
this is no hill, overgrown with families, but
a volcano! Make money out of that!
Can vineyards ever hold the danger
of Vesuvius? A giant without fear cannot
be bound with flax. And the delirium
of lips alone has the same power:
to make the vineyards stir and turn heavily,
to belch out their lava of hate.
Your daughters shall all become prostitutes
and all your sons turn into poets!
You shall rear a bastard child, my daughter!
Waste your flesh upon the gypsies, son!
May you never own a piece of fertile land
you who take your substance from my blood.
Harder than any cornerstone, as
binding as the words of a dying man,
I curse you: do not look for happiness
upon my mountain where you move like ants!
At some hour unforeseen, some time unknowable,
you will realise, the whole lot of you, how
enormous and without measure is
the mountain of God’s seventh law.
Epilogue
There are blanks in memory cataracts
on our eyes; the seven veils.
I no longer remember you separately
as a face but a white emptiness
without true features.
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