As I began work on the Elegies I found that the long lines of the original were difficult to reproduce in English (or, more strictly speaking, American). Read aloud, they sounded fine; the listener could follow in the reader’s voice the emphases, hesitations, and variations in speed. On the page, however, the long line did not readily suggest the “living” quality, and was one of the features most likely, I came to feel, to make the poem seem like a museum piece. As I was pondering solutions to this problem, I happened to re-read some of William Carlos Williams’ late poetry. I realized with a start that Williams’ triadic line, made up of three “variable feet,” units equal in length of speaking time, was a possible model. Much of Williams’ late work can with justice be called “elegiac,” and his triadic line combines the comprehensiveness of the traditional elegiac line with the fragmented and eccentric qualities of modern American speech:
Inseparable from the fire
its light
takes precedence over it.
Then follows
what we have dreaded—
but it can never
overcome what has gone before.
In the huge gap
between the flash
and the thunderstroke
spring has come in
or a deep snow fallen.
A long line made up of three shorter, overlapping units makes an extremely flexible instrument of expression. The more I have worked with it, the deeper my respect for it has grown. Readers who are initially put off by having poetry “scored” so precisely on the page will find that familiarity resolves most difficulties, and that reading aloud is, as always, the best test of the poetry’s efficacy. For me, moreover, the usefulness of the variable foot and the triadic line is again and again bound up with solutions not only to problems of movement and rhythmic control, but of precise expression as well, getting Rilke’s difficult German to make clear and interesting sense in English. Two earlier translators of the Elegies, Edward and Vita Sackville-West, compared Rilke’s line to “an immense road, admitting many thoughts and images abreast of one another, and seeming to suggest movement in more directions than one.” Their solution—a monotonously regular blank verse—is dismaying, but their characterization of Rilke’s line is accurate indeed, and helps, I think, to explain my choice.
One further point about my use of the “variable foot.” The Elegies were serialized, as I worked on them, over a two and a half year period in the magazine FIELD. During this time my practice with the variable foot changed markedly. My first versions, I came to feel, were too choppy and fragmented, partly from an attempt to stay too close to the lines of the original. I found myself lengthening the variable foot and making it run more smoothly, and I eventually revised all ten Elegies to conform to this practice. Thus, the first published version of the First Elegy was 101 lines; the present one is 82 (the original is 95). I also came to feel that normal punctuation, with the exception of commas, was most appropriate; this practice, in fact, reflects Williams’ own. The present version, then, represents a fairly considerable revision of the serialized Elegies, not so much in terms of phrasing (although a number of early inaccuracies have been corrected) as in line length and enjambment.
I cannot begin to document all the help and encouragement I received in the course of this project, but I am eager to acknowledge the occasional assistance I received from David Walker, Marjorie Hoover, Richard Kent, and Galway Kinnell (who made me reconsider my early handling of the triadic line), as well as the pervasive aid of John Hobbs, who read each Elegy in draft and criticized it as poetry in English; of Stuart Friebert, who was characteristically generous with his time and encouragement in considering both German and English, time and again; and of Richard Exner, who urged me to a high standard of accuracy and brought his scrupulous attention to bear on all ten Elegies, once through as they were serialized, and then again as I prepared the revised version, with an exemplary patience in helping me unravel the knottiest and most persistent problems. To these excellent coaches, critics, and clarifiers, I gratefully dedicate this translation.
DUINO ELEGIES
FIRST ELEGY
If I cried out
who would hear me up there
among the angelic orders?
And suppose one suddenly
took me to his heart
I would shrivel
I couldn’t survive
next to his
greater existence.
Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear
and it awes us so much
because it so coolly
disdains to destroy us.
Every single angel
is terrible!
And since that’s the case
I choke back my own
dark birdcall
my sobbing.
Oh who can we turn to
in this need?
Not angels
not people
and the cunning animals
realize at once
that we aren’t especially
at home
in the deciphered world
What’s left?
Maybe some tree
on a hillside
one that you’d see every day
and the perverse loyalty
of some habit
that pleased us
and then moved in for good.
Oh and the night
the night, when the wind
full of outer space
gnaws at our lifted faces
— she’d wait for anyone
that much desired
mildly disappointing lady
whom the lone heart
has to encounter
with so much effort.
Is it easier for lovers?
Ah, they only manage
by being together
to conceal each other’s fate!
You still don’t know?
Throw armfuls of emptiness
out to the spaces
that we breathe —
maybe the birds
will sense
the expanded air
flying more fervently.
Sure, spring depended on you.
Many stars lined up
hoping you’d notice.
A wave rose toward you
out of the past
or a violin
offered itself
as you passed an open window.
These were instructions,
your mission.
But could you perform it?
Weren’t you always
distracted
waiting for something
as if all this
was announcing
a lover’s arrival?
(Where could you keep her
as long as those
huge strange thoughts
are coming and going
and staying the night?)
But sing, when you must,
of great lovers:
their fame
has a long way to go
before it is really immortal.
Those you almost envied
the unrequited
whom you found
more loving
than the gratified
the content —
begin again and again
the praise you can never
fully express.
Think of it:
the hero survives.
Even his ruin
is only another
excuse to continue
a final birth.
But nature, exhausted
takes lovers
back into herself
as if she couldn’t accomplish
that kind of vitality twice.
Have you thought
of Gaspara Stampa
hard enough?
dwelt on her
so that a girl
whose lover has disappeared
can feel
from that tremendous
example of love
‘Make me like her’?
Shouldn’t these ancient
sufferings of ours
finally start to bear fruit?
Isn’t it time
that in love
we freed ourselves
from the loved one
and, trembling,
endured
as the arrow endures the string
collecting itself
to be more than itself
as it shoots?
For there is no remaining,
no place to stay.
Voices, voices.
Listen, my heart
as only the saints
have listened
for a gigantic call
to lift them
right off the ground
but they go on kneeling
impossible beings
taking no notice
that’s how completely
they listened.
Not that you
could bear hearing
God’s voice
— oh no.
But listen
to that soft
blowing …
that endless report
that grows out of silence.
It rustles toward you
from those who died young.
When you went into churches
in Naples and Rome
didn’t their fates
touch you gently?
Or else an inscription
stirred you deeply
like that tablet
in Santa Maria Formosa
not long ago.
What do they want of me?
I must softly erase
my own slight
sense of injustice
for it sometimes
slows down
their spirits’ pure movements.
Of course it is odd
to live no more
on the earth
to abandon customs
you’ve just begun
to get used to
not to give meaning
to roses
and other such
promising things
in terms of
a human future
to be held no more
by hands that can
never relax
for fear they will drop you
and even to put
your name to one side
like a broken toy.
Strange
to wish wishes no longer.
Strange
to see things
that seemed to
belong together
floating in every
direction.
It’s very hard to be dead
and you try
to make up for lost time
till slowly you start
to get whiffs
of eternity.
But the living are wrong
in the sharp
distinctions they make.
Angels, it seems,
don’t always know
if they’re moving among
the living or the dead.
The drift of eternity
drags all the ages of man
through both of those spheres
and its sound
rises over them both.
Those who have died young
finally need us no longer
— you can be weaned
from things of this world
as gently as a child
outgrows its mother’s breast.
But we who have need
of those huge mysteries
we who can sometimes
draw up from
wellsprings of sadness
rejoicing and progress
how could we exist
without them?
Is the old tale pointless
that tells how music began
in the midst of the mourning
for Linos
piercing
the arid numbness
and, in that stunned
space
where an almost
godlike youth
had suddenly stopped existing
made emptiness vibrate
in ways
that thrill us
comfort us
help us now?
SECOND ELEGY
Every angel is terrible.
And still, alas
knowing all that
I serenade you
you almost deadly
birds of the soul.
Where are the days of Tobias
when one of these
brightest of creatures
stood
at the simple front door
disguised a little
for the trip
and not so frightening
(a young man
like the one
who looked curiously
out at him).
If the dangerous archangel
took one step now
down toward us
from behind the stars
our heartbeats
rising like thunder
would kill us.
Who are you?
Creation’s spoiled darlings
among the first to be perfect
a chain of mountains
peaks and ridges
red in the morning light
of all creation
the blossoming godhead’s pollen
joints of pure light
corridors
staircases
thrones
pockets of essence
ecstasy shields
tumultuous storms
of delightful feelings
then suddenly
separate
mirrors
gathering the beauty
that streamed away from them
back to their own faces again.
For as we feel
we evaporate
oh we
breathe ourselves out
and away
emberglow to emberglow
we give off a fainter smell.
It’s true that someone
may say to us
‘You’re in my blood
this room
the spring
is filling with you’ …
What good is that?
he can’t keep us
we vanish inside him
around him.
And the beautiful
oh who can hold them back?
It’s endless:
appearance shines
from their faces
disappearing — like dew
rising from morning grass
we breathe away
what is ours
like steam from a hot dish.
Oh smile where are you going?
Oh lifted glance
new, warm
receding wave of the heart
woe is me?
it’s all of us.
Does the outer space
into which we dissolve
taste of us at all?
Do the angels absorb
only what’s theirs
what streamed away from them
or do they sometimes get
as if by mistake
a little of our being too?
Are we mixed into
their features
as slightly
as that vague look
in the faces
of pregnant women?
In their swirling
return to themselves
they don’t notice it.
(How could they notice it?)
Lovers, if they knew how
might say strange things
in the night air.
For it seems
that all things try
to conceal us.
See, the trees are
and the houses we live in
still hold their own,
It’s just we
who pass everything by
like air being traded
for air.
And all things agree
to keep quiet about us
maybe half to shame us
and half from a hope
they can’t express.
Lovers, you who are
each other’s satisfaction
I ask you about us.
You hold each other.
Does that settle it?
You see
it sometimes happens
that my hands
grow conscious
of each other
or that my used face
shelters itself
within them.
That gives me
a slight sensation.
But who’d claim from that
to exist?
You though
who grow
by each other’s ecstasy
until drowning
you beg ‘no more!’
you who under
each other’s hands
become more abundant
like the grapes
of great vintages
fading at times
but only because
the other completely
takes over —
I ask you about us.
I know
that touch
is a blessing for you
because the caress lasts
because what you cover
so tenderly
does not disappear
because you can sense
underneath the touch
some kind of pure
duration.
Somehow eternity
almost seems possible
as you embrace.
And yet
when you’ve got past
the fear in that first
exchange of glances
the mooning at the window
and that first walk
together in the garden
one time:
lovers, are you the same?
When you lift
each other to your lips
mouth to mouth
drink to drink —
oh how oddly
the drinker seems
to withdraw
from the act of drinking.
Weren’t you astonished
by the discretion
of human gesture
on Attic grave steles?
Didn’t love and parting
sit so lightly
on shoulders
that they seemed
to be made of a substance
different from ours?
Do you recall
how the hands rest
without any pressure
though there is great
strength in the torsos?
Those figures spoke
a language of self-mastery:
we’ve come to this point
this is us
touching this way
the gods
may push us around
but that is something
for them to decide.
If only we too
could discover an orchard
some pure, contained
human, narrow
strip of land
between river and rock.
For our own heart
outgrows us
just as it did them
and we can’t follow it
by gazing at pictures
that soothe it
or at godlike bodies
that restrain it
by their very size.
THIRD ELEGY
It’s one thing
to sing the beloved.
That hidden
guilty river-god
of the blood
is something else.
What does her young lover
whom she can recognize
at a distance
understand of that
lord of desire, who often
out of this lonely young man
(before the girl soothed him
and often as if
she didn’t exist)
raised his godhead
dripping with what
unrecognizable stuff
rousing the night
to a continuous
tumult.
Oh Neptune of the blood
his terrible trident.
Oh the dark wind
sounding from his chest
through the spiral conch!
Listen to the night
scooping and hollowing out …
You stars
doesn’t the lover’s
delight in his
loved one’s countenance
come from you?
Doesn’t his secret insight
into her pure face
come from the pure constellations?
It wasn’t you
oh no
and it wasn’t his mother
who bent his brows
to this expectant arch.
Not from your mouth
girl so aware of him
not from that contact
did his lips curve
into this fruitful expression.
Do you really think
Your soft approach
could shake him that way
you who walk
like the wind at dawn?
Oh yes you startled
his heart
but more ancient fears
crashed down inside him
at the shock of your touch.
Call him …
you can’t free him
completely from
those dark companions.
Of course he wants to escape
and he does
and relieved he gets used to
your heart’s seclusion
and takes hold
and begins to be himself.
But did he
ever really
begin himself?
Mother
you made him little
you started him
he was new to you
and you arched
the friendly world
over his new eyes
and shut out
the strange one.
Where, where
are the years
when your slender shape
was simply enough
to block out
waves of approaching chaos?
You hid so much from him this way
rendering harmless
the room that grew
suspicious at night
and from the full
sanctuary of your heart
you mixed something human
into his nightspace.
And you set the night-light
not in the darkness
but in your nearness
your presence
and it shone
out of friendship.
There wasn’t a creak
you couldn’t explain
smiling
as if you had known
for a long time
exactly when
the floor would assert itself …
And he listened
and he was soothed.
That’s what your
getting up
so tenderly
achieved: his tall
cloaked fate went back
behind the wardrobe
and his unruly future
(so easily mussed)
conformed to the folds
of the curtain.
And while he lay there
relieved
with your image
dissolving sweetly
under his drowsy lids
as he sank towards sleep
he seemed protected …
but within
who could divert
or contain
the floods
of his origin?
Ah, there were
no precautions in the sleeper
… sleeping
but dreaming, but
running a fever
how he let himself go!
He, the new one
the shy one
how he was tangled
in the spreading
roots and tendrils
of inner event
twisting in primitive patterns
in choking growths
in the shapes
of killer animals.
How he submitted.
Made love.
Loved his own
inwardness
his inner wilderness
the primeval forest
where his heart stood
like a green shoot
among huge fallen trees.
Made love.
Let it go, went on
down through his own
roots and out
to the monstrous beginning
where his little birth
had happened so long ago.
Loving it
he waded downward
into more ancient blood
into canyons
where Horror itself
lay gorged from eating
his fathers
and every Terror
knew him
and winked in complicity.
Yes, Atrocity smiled …
seldom had you
smiled that tenderly, mother.
Why shouldn’t he love it
since it had smiled.
He loved it
before he loved you
because when you carried him
it was already
dissolved
in the water that makes
the embryo float.
You see
we don’t love
a single season
like the flowers.
When we love
a sap
older than time
rises through our arms.
My dear
it’s like this:
that we love inside ourselves
not one person
not some future being
but seething multitudes
not a particular child
but the fathers
who lie at rest
in our depths
like ruined mountains
and the dry riverbeds
of earlier mothers
and the whole
soundless landscape
under the clouded
or clear sky
of its destiny
this, my dear
came before you.
And you yourself
what do you know?
You stirred up
prehistory
in your lover.
What passions
welled up
from those long dead beings?
What women
hated you
what kind of men
lost in darkness
did you waken within
his youthful veins?
Dead children
strained to touch you …
Oh gently, gently
Do a loving day’s work
for his sake
lead him
toward the garden
let him have
more than enough of the night …
Hold him back …
FOURTH ELEGY
O trees of life
when is your winter?
We’re not in tune
we’re not instinctive
like migrating birds.
Overtaken
overdue
we push ourselves suddenly
into the wind
and arrive surprised
at an indifferent pond.
We understand
blooming and withering
we know them both at once.
And somewhere lions roam
knowing nothing of weakness
so long as their
majesty lasts.
But we
when we’re fully intent
on one thing
can already feel
the pull of another.
Hatred is always close by.
Aren’t lovers always
coming to sheer drop-offs
inside each other
they who promised themselves
open spaces, good hunting
and a homeland?
As when for some
quick sketch
a contrasting background
is made with great care
so we can see the drawing.
No effort is spared.
We don’t know
the contour of feeling
we only know what molds it
from without.
Who hasn’t sat tense
before his own heart’s curtain?
It rose.
There was the scenery
of departure.
Easy to understand.
The familiar garden
swaying slightly.
Then the dancer appeared.
Not him! Enough!
However lightly he moves
he’s just disguised
and he turns into a burgher
who enters his house
by way of the kitchen.
I don’t want these
half-filled masks
a doll, a puppet
is better. It’s full.
I can endure
the stuffed body
and the wire
and the face that’s
pure appearance.
Here. I’m waiting.
Even if the lights go out
even if they tell me
“That’s all”
even if emptiness
drifts from the stage
in gray puffs of air
even if none
of my silent ancestors
sits by me any more
no woman
not even the boy
with the brown squinting eye.
I’ll stay put anyway.
I can still watch.
Don’t you think I’m right?
You, father
whose life
tasted so bitter
after you tasted mine
the first thick doses
of my necessity
still tasting
again and again
as I grew up
and, intrigued
by the aftertaste
of such a strange future
tried out my cloudy gaze
you, my father
who so often since
your own death
have had fears about me
deep in my own hope
giving up that calm
that the dead have
surrendering
whole kingdoms of calm
for my morsel of fate.
Don’t you think I’m right?
And you
don’t you think so?
you who loved me
for my little beginning
of love for you
I always lost track of
because the distance
in your face
even as I loved it
turned into outer space
where you no longer existed …
When I’m in the mood
to wait
in front of the puppet stage
no, rather to stare
so intently that finally
an angel must come
as an actor
to make up for my staring
pulling the stuffed bodies
up to life.
Angel and puppet:
then at last
there’s a play.
Then what we separate
by our very being
comes together.
Then the whole
cycle of change
finds its first origin
in the seasons of our life.
Above us then
and just beyond
the angel is playing.
Look, surely the dying
should guess how full
of pretence everything
we achieve here is.
Nothing is really itself.
Oh the hours in childhood
when the shapes of things
spoke of more than the past
and when what lay before us
wasn’t the future.
We grew of course
and we sometimes hurried
to grow up sooner
half for the sake of those
who had nothing more
than the fact
of being grown up.
Yet we contented ourselves
in our solitary play
with permanent things
and we stood there
in the gap
between world and plaything
in a place that had been
prepared from the start
for some pure event.
Who shows a child
as he really is?
Who sets him among the stars
and puts the measure of distance
in his hand?
Who makes the child’s death
out of gray bread
that gets hard
who leaves it there
in his round mouth
like the core
of a lovely apple?
Murderers aren’t hard
to comprehend.
But this:
to contain death
the whole of death
even before life has begun
to contain it so gently
and not to be angry —
this is indescribable.
FIFTH ELEGY
dedicated to Frau Hertha von Koenig
But tell me
who are they
these vagabonds
even more transient
than we are?
urged on from childhood
twisted (for whose sake?)
by some will
that is never content?
Instead it keeps
twisting them
bending them
slings them and
swings them
tosses them up
and catches them
they seem to come down
from an oiled and
slipperier air
to land on a carpet
worn threadbare
from their continual
leaping and tumbling
a carpet lost in the cosmos
stuck there like a plaster
as if the suburban sky
had somehow wounded the earth.
And barely there
upright, showing faintly
the huge capital D
that seems to stand
for existence … presence …
the relentless grip
rolls even the strongest men
round and round
having fun
like Augustus the Strong
rolling a tin plate up
at the dinner table.
Ah, and around this center:
the rose of watching
blooming
and dropping its petals.
Around this pestle
this pistil
smitten by its own
blossoming pollen
re-fertilized to bear
the false fruit of disgust
that they’re never conscious of
the glossiest veneer
lit by the smirk of disgust.
There’s the limp
wrinkled
weight-lifter
an old man who now
just beats the drum
shrunk in his
mighty skin
as if it had once
held two men
and the other
already lay
in the graveyard
while this one
survived him
living on, deaf
and sometimes
a bit dazed in his widowed
skin.
But the young one, the man
who might be the son
of a neck and a nun
tightly and powerfully filled
with muscle
and artlessness.
Oh you, all of you
who were given
to be the toy
of some pain
when it was still young
during one of its long
convalescences …
And you especially
who fall daily
a hundred times
unripe, with the plummet
that only fruit can know
from that tree
of jointly constructed motion
(that goes through
spring, summer
and autumn
in a few minutes
faster than water)
fall with a thump
on the grave:
sometimes
in a split-second pause
a loving look
toward your
seldom tender mother
may start to rise up
in your face:
then it loses itself
in your body
whose surface absorbs it
that self-conscious
hardly attempted look
and again
the man claps his hands
for your leap
and before
any pain can get closer
to your heart
that is always
galloping on ahead
there comes that burning
in the soles of your feet
anticipating what causes it
and chasing a few
quick physical tears
into your eyes.
And still, blindly
the smile …
O take it, angel!
pluck it
this small-flowered
healing herb
and go get a vase for it
preserve it!
Put it with those joys
that still aren’t
open to us
praise it
in a lovely urn
with a florid
soaring inscription:
Subrisio
Saltat.
And then you
darling, you
whom the most
delicious pleasures
have leaped right over
silently.
Maybe your frills
are happy for you —
or the green
metallic silk
tight across
your hard young breasts
feels that it’s
endlessly pampered
and in need of nothing.
You
set out on display
again and again
but differently each time
like the indifferent fruit
on the wavering
pans of the balance
in public
below the shoulders.
Where, oh where
is that place
— I carry it in my heart —
where for a long time
they couldn’t perform
but fell away from each other
like mating animals
badly paired
where the weights
are still heavy
where the plates
still wobble off
the fruitlessly
twirling sticks …
And suddenly
in this difficult Nowhere
suddenly the ineffable
place where the pure
“Too-little”
incredibly transforms itself
somersaulting
into that empty
“Too-much.”
Where the problem that had
so many digits
comes out right
with nothing left over.
Squares
oh square in Paris
infinite showplace
where the milliner
Madame Lamort
slings and winds
the restless
ways of the world
endless ribbons
finding new loops for them
frill flowers
cockades
artificial fruits
— all falsely dyed
for the cheap winter hats
of Destiny.
…
Angel: suppose there’s a place
we don’t know of
and there
on an indescribable carpet
lovers could show
the feats they aren’t
able to show here
the daring high figures
of the heart’s leap
their towers of ecstasy
their ladders long since
propped against each other
where there was never any ground
trembling
and they could
before the surrounding
spectators, the hushed
innumerable dead:
wouldn’t those dead
throw them then
their forever hoarded
and hidden
unknown to us
but eternally current
coins of happiness
at the feet of the pair
whose smile was finally
truthful there
on that fulfilled
carpet?
SIXTH ELEGY
Fig tree
for a long time
it’s meant a lot to me
how you almost completely
skip blossoming
and press your purest secret
unglorified
ahead of time
into your definite fruit.
Like the pipe
of a fountain
your arching boughs
drive the sap down
drive it up
and it springs from sleep
hardly awake
to the joy of its
sweetest achievement.
See:
like the god
into the swan.
… But we
we linger, alas
our honor lies
in our blooming
and we’re betrayed
by the time we enter
the overdue core
of our ultimate fruit.
Only for a few
the urge to action
rises so strongly
that they’re already
standing by
glowing
in the fullness of their hearts
when the temptation to bloom
touches their young mouths
and eyelids
like soothing night air:
heroes, maybe
and those who are meant
to disappear early
whose veins
Death the gardener
has twisted differently.
They hurtle ahead
in advance of their own smiles
like the team
of charging horses
before the conquering king
in the mild, molded reliefs
at Karnak.
The hero is strangely close
to those who died young.
Permanence
doesn’t interest him.
His dawn is his lifetime.
He constantly
takes himself off
and enters
the changed constellation
of his everlasting risk.
Few could find him there.
But that dark Fate
who has nothing to say for us
suddenly all inspired
sings him on into the storm
of his uproarious world.
I hear no one like him.
All at once
his dimmed note
carried on rivering air
sounds through me.
Then how I’d like to hide
from this great longing!
If I were, oh
if I were a boy
and still had the chance
still sat
arms propped on the future
and read about Samson
how his mother gave birth
to nothing and then
to everything.
Wasn’t he hero already
inside you, mother
and didn’t his
imperious choosing
begin there within you?
Thousands were brewing
in the womb
wishing to be him
but look:
he took hold
he discriminated
chose and accomplished.
And if he ever
broke pillars apart
it was when he burst out
of the world of your body
into a narrower world
where he went on
choosing, accomplishing.
Oh mothers of heroes!
sources of such
torrential rivers!
You gorges in which
virgins have already
plunged, weeping
from the heart’s high rim
future offerings
to the son.
For whenever the hero
stormed through the stations of love
each heart that beat
for his sake
only lifted him higher
and, already turning away
he stood
at the end of the smiles
transformed.
SEVENTH ELEGY
No more wooing, voice
you’re outgrowing that
don’t let your cry
be a wooing cry
even though it could be
as pure as a bird’s
that the season lifts up
as she herself rises
nearly forgetting
that it’s just
a fretful creature
and not some single heart
to be tossed
toward happiness
deep into intimate skies.
Like him you want
to call forth a still
invisible mate
a silent listener
in whom a reply
slowly awakens
warming itself
by hearing yours
to become
your own
bold feeling’s
blazing partner.
Oh and spring
would understand
— not one crevice
that wouldn’t echo
annunciation.
The first small
questioning flutenotes
reinforced by echoing stillness
that rises all round
in the pure, affirmative day.
Then on up the steps —
a call that climbs
each air-stair
toward the dreamed
temple of the future
then the trill
the fountain
whose rising jet
catches the falling water
up again
in a game of promising …
And all before it
the Summer.
Not only those
summer mornings
not only the way
they change into day
glowing because of the sunrise.
Not only the days
gentle among the flowers
while strong and enormous
overhead, among the great
shapes of the trees.
Not only the devotion
of these unfolded powers
not only the roads
not only the evening meadows
not only the clear breathing
that follows afternoon thunderstorms
not only approaching sleep
and a premonition
late evening …
But the nights!
but the high summer nights
but the stars
stars of the earth.
Oh to be dead
one of these days
and to know that they
are infinite
all of the stars
for how
how
how to forget them!
You see, I’ve called for a lover.
But it wasn’t just she
who would come.
Girls would come out of
inadequate graves
and stand near …
Well how could I
limit my call
after I’d called it?
The buried are always
seeking the earth again.
You children
one single thing
fully grasped
here and now
would be valid
for many.
Don’t suppose
that fate’s any more
than childhood’s density.
How often you really
overtook your lover
breathing, breathing deep
after a marvelous run
toward nothing more
than the open air.
Just to be here
is a delight!
You knew that too
you girls who seemed
deprived of it
you who were sunk
in the city’s worst alleys
festering there, or exposed
to its garbage and filth.
For each had an hour
or maybe not even that much
just some unmeasurable
moment of time
between two whiles
when she had existence
completely
down to her fingertips!
It’s just that we forget
so easily
what our genial neighbor
neither approves of
nor grudges us.
We want it visible
to show
when even the most
visible joy
will reveal itself
only when we have
transformed it within.
There’s nowhere, my love
the world can exist
except within.
Our lives are used up
in transformations
and what’s outside us
always diminishing
vanishes.
Where a solid house
once stood
a wholly fictitious image
cuts in, just as if
the whole thing existed
completely in the brain.
The Zeitgeist creates
huge silos of power
that are as shapeless
as the straining urge
he acquires from everything else.
He has forgotten the temples.
We are the ones
who try surreptitiously
to save such squanderings
of the heart.
Yes, where one still stands
a thing that once was
prayed to, knelt to,
served — it reaches
just as it is
into the unseen world.
Many don’t notice
and miss the chance
to build it now
inside themselves
with pillars and statues
greater than ever!
Every heavy
turning back of the earth
has such disinherited ones
who possess
neither earlier things
nor what’s to come.
For what’s ahead
is distant for men.
This shouldn’t confuse us
it should confirm
our preserving a form
we still recognize:
This stood among men
at one time
stood in the midst of fate
of destructive fate
stood in the midst of not
knowing where to go
as if it existed
and bent the stars
down toward it
from the established heavens.
Angel!
I’m showing it to you
there it is!
let it stand
so that you see it
redeemed at last
upright.
Columns, pylons,
the Sphinx
the cathedral’s gray
determined thrust
from some fading
or unknown city.
Wasn’t this like a miracle?
Gaze at it, angel
it’s us
you mighty being
you tell them that we could
accomplish such things
my breath isn’t enough
for such celebration.
For it seems after all
that we haven’t neglected
the spaces
our generous portion
these spaces — ours
(How frighteningly vast
they must be
if thousands of years
of our feelings
have not overcrowded them.)
But a tower was great
wasn’t it?
Oh angel it was
it was great
even set next to you.
Chartres was great
and music reached
even higher
climbing beyond us.
Even a girl in love
alone at night
by her window
didn’t she reach to your knee?
Don’t think I’m wooing you!
Angel
even if I am
you won’t come
for my call
is always full of rising
you can’t move
against such a current
it’s just too strong.
My call is an outstretched arm
and its high, reaching
open hand
is always before you
open
incomprehensible being
wide open
to defend
to warn off.
EIGHTH ELEGY
dedicated to Rudolf Kassner
With its whole gaze
a creature
looks out at the open.
But our eyes
are as though turned in
and they seem to set traps
all around it
as if to prevent
its going free.
We can only know
what is out there
from an animal’s features
for we make even infants
turn and look back
at the way things are shaped
not toward the open
that lies so deep
in an animal’s face.
Free from death.
Because we’re the ones
who see death.
The animal that’s free
always has
its destruction behind it
and God ahead of it
and when it moves
it moves forward
forever and ever
like a flowing spring.
We never have
even for one single day
that pure space before us
that flowers can open
endlessly into.
It’s always world
it’s never a nowhere
where there isn’t
any ‘no,’ any ‘don’t’
never the pure
the untended thing
you breathe
and endlessly know
and never desire:
what a child
sometimes gives himself up to
and grows still
and has to be
shaken out of.
Or another one dies
and then is it.
For when you get close to death
you don’t see death anymore
you look out past it
and maybe then
with an animal’s wide gaze.
Lovers, if they weren’t
blocking each other’s view
are close to it
marveling …
As if by an oversight
it opens up to them
behind each other …
But neither one can get past
and again
world comes back to them.
Always when we face
the creation
we see only
a kind of reflection
of the freedom
that we ourselves have dimmed.
Or it happens
that an animal
some mute beast
raises its head
and imperturbably
looks right through us.
That’s what fate means:
to be facing each other
and nothing but each other
and to be doing it forever.
If the animal
coming toward us so surely
from another direction
had our kind of consciousness
he’d drag us around in his sway.
But his being
is infinite to him
incomprehensible, and without
a sense of his condition
pure as his gaze.
And where we see the future
he sees everything
and himself in everything
healed and whole
forever.
And yet within
the warm and watchful beast
there’s the weight and care
of a huge sadness.
For there clings to him
something that often
overwhelms us
— memory
a recollection that
whatever we’re striving for now
was once closer and truer
and that its union with us
was incredibly tender.
Here everything is distance
there it was breath.
After the first home
the second seems hybrid
and windy.
Oh the bliss
of the little creature
that stays forever
inside the womb that conceived it.
Oh happiness of the gnat
still hopping within
even on its wedding day:
for womb
is everything.
And look at the
half assurance of the bird
that almost seems to know
both states from his origin
like the soul of an Etruscan
come from a dead man
stowed in a space
with his own resting figure
as the lid.
And how bewildered
is something that has to fly
if it came from a womb.
As though terrified of itself
it shivers through the air
the way a crack
goes through a cup
the way a bat’s track tears
through the porcelain of evening.
And we:
spectators, always
everywhere
looking at all of that
never beyond!
It fills us too full.
We set it right.
It disintegrates.
We set it right again
and we disintegrate too.
Who has turned us around this way
so that we’re always
whatever we do
in the posture of someone
who is leaving?
Like a man
on the final hill
that shows him
his whole valley
one last time
who turns and stands there
lingering —
that’s how we live
always
saying goodbye.
NINTH ELEGY
Why, if it’s possible
to spend our little
span of existence
as laurel
slightly darker
than all the other greens
with tiny waves
on each leaf’s rim
(like a wind’s smile)
— why then
still insist
on being human
and shrinking from fate
long for it too? …
Oh, not because happiness
— that part of approaching ruin
that rushes ahead of it —
is real.
Not out of curiosity
not to exercise the heart
that would have been fine
in the laurel …
But just because to be here
means so much
and because
everything here
all this that’s disappearing
seems to need us
to concern us
in some strange way
we, who disappear
even faster!
It’s one time
for each thing
and only one.
Once and no more.
And the same for us:
once.
Then never again.
But this once having been
even though only once
having been on earth
seems as though
it can’t be undone.
And so we push ourselves
wanting to master it
wanting to hold it all
in our own two hands
in the overloaded gaze
and the dumbstruck heart.
Trying to become it.
To give it to someone?
No, we’d like most
to keep it all ourselves
forever …
Ah, but what
can we take across
to the other realm
when we leave?
Not our perception
learned here so slowly
and nothing
that’s happened here.
Not one thing.
So that means we take pain.
Take, above all
the heaviness of existing
take the long
experience of love
take
truly unsayable things.
But later
under the stars
why bother?
They are better
at the unsayable.
After all, isn’t what
the wanderer brings back
from the mountain slopes
to the valley
not a handful of earth
that no one could say
but rather a word
hard-won, pure,
the yellow and blue
gentian?
Are we on this earth to say:
House
Bridge
Fountain
Jug Gate
Fruit-tree Window
at best:
Column …
Tower …?
but to say these words
you understand
with an intensity
the things themselves
never dreamed they’d express.
Isn’t the earth’s
hidden strategy
when she so slyly
urges two lovers on
that each and every thing
should be transformed
by the delight
of sharing their feelings?
Threshold:
what it means
to two lovers
that they too
should be wearing down
an old doorsill
a bit more
after the many
before them
and before
the many to come
… lightly.
Here is the time
for the sayable
here is its home.
Speak, bear witness.
More than ever
things fall away from us
livable things
and what crowds them out
and replaces them
is an event
for which there’s no image.
An event
under crusts
that will tear open
easily
just as soon
as it outgrows them
and its interests
call for new limits.
Between the hammer strokes
our hearts survive
like the tongue
that between the teeth
and in spite of everything
goes on praising.
Praise the world
to the angel
not the unsayable
you can’t impress him
with sumptuous feelings —
in the universe
where he feels things
so fully
you’re just a novice.
Show him, then,
some simple thing
shaped by its passage
through generations
that lives as a belonging
near the hand, in the gaze.
Tell him of Things.
He’ll stand more astonished
than you did
beside the rope-maker
in Rome, or the potter
by the Nile.
Show him how happy
a thing can be
how blameless and ours
how even the wail of sorrow
can settle purely
into its own form
and serve as a thing
or die into a thing
to a realm where even
the violin can’t recall it.
And these things
that take their life
from impermanence
they understand
that you’re praising them:
perishing, they trust
to us — the most
perishable of all —
for their preservation.
They want us to change them
completely
inside our invisible hearts
into — oh endlessly —
into ourselves!
Whoever we might
turn out to be
at the end.
Earth, isn’t this
what you want:
rising up
inside us invisibly
once more?
Isn’t it your dream
to be invisible someday?
Earth! invisible!
what is it
you urgently ask for
if not transformation?
Earth, my love
I will do it.
Believe me
your springtimes
are no longer needed
to win me — one
just one, is already
too much for my blood.
I have been yours
unable to say so
for a long time now.
You were right
always
and affable Death
is your own
holy notion.
Look, I’m living.
On what?
Neither my childhood
nor my future
is growing smaller …
Being
in excess
wells up
in my heart.
TENTH ELEGY
That someday
at the close of this
fierce vision
I might sing praise
and jubilation to
assenting angels.
That the heart’s
clear-striking hammers
might not falter
from landing on
slack or doubtful
or snapping strings.
That my face, streaming
might make me
more radiant
that this homely weeping
might bloom.
Oh you nights
that I grieved through
how much you will
mean to me then.
Disconsolate sisters
why didn’t I kneel
more fully
to accept you
and lose myself more
in your loosened hair?
How we squander our sorrows
gazing beyond them
into the sad
wastes of duration
to see if maybe
they have a limit.
But they are
our winter foliage
our dark evergreens
one of the seasons
of our secret year
— and not only a season
they are situation,
settlement, lair,
soil, home.
It’s true, though:
how strange are the back streets
of Pain City
where, in the false silence
created from too much noise
there swaggers out
the slop that’s cast
from the mould of emptiness
the gilded hubbub
the bursting monument.
Oh how an angel
would stamp out their
Consolation Market
leaving no trace
— the church beside it too
bought ready-made
as swept and shut tight
and disappointed
as a post office
on Sunday.
Out further, though
there are always
the rippling edges of the Fair.
Freedom’s swing-rides!
Zeal’s divers and jugglers!
And tarted-up Good Luck’s
lifelike shooting range
where the tin targets
ring and flop over
when a better shot hits them.
From cheer to chance
he lurches on
since booths
to please all curiosities
babble and drum
and tout their wares.
Special Attraction for Adults:
How Money Reproduces
Anatomically Valid
Not Just Entertainment
Money’s Own Genitals
Nothing Left Out
The Act Itself
It’s Educational
and It Helps
Make You Potent …
Oh, but just outside
beyond the last
billboard plastered
with ads for “Deathless”
that bitter beer
that tastes sweet
to its drinkers
as long as they keep chewing
fresh distractions —
just behind that billboard
right there
everything’s real.
Children play there
and lovers embrace
off to one side
so seriously
in the sparse grass
where dogs do doggy things.
The young man is drawn
further — maybe he’s fallen
in love with a young Lament …
He follows her into the meadows
she says:
It’s a long way.
We live out there …
Where?
And the young man follows.
Roused by the way she moves.
Her shoulder, her neck —
maybe she comes from
a splendid race.
But he leaves her
goes back, turning
to wave … What’s the use?
She’s just a Lament.
Only those who’ve died young
in their first state
of timeless calm
— their weaning —
follow her lovingly.
She waits for young girls
and befriends them.
Gently she shows them
what she wears.
Pearls of pain
and the fine-spun
veils of Patience.
With young men
she walks along
in silence.
But there where they live
in the valley
one of the older Laments
answers the youth
when he questions her:
We were once
she says,
a great race
we Laments.
Our fathers
worked the mines up there
in the mountain-range
sometimes among men
you’ll find a polished
lump of primeval Pain
or the petrified slag
of Anger from
an old volcano.
Yes, that came from up there.
We used to be rich.
And she leads him lightly
through the broad
landscape of Lamentation
shows him the columns of temples
or the ruins of castles
from which the Lords of Lament
once ruled the land wisely.
Shows him the tall tear trees
and the fields of sadness in bloom
(what the living know only
as tender foliage)
shows him the herds of grief
pasturing
and sometimes
a bird startles
and writes
as it flies flatly
through their field of vision
the image of its
solitary cry.
In the evening
she leads him to the graves
of the ancients
of the race of Laments
the sibyls
and the lords of warning.
But when night comes
they go more slowly
and soon there looms ahead
in the moonlight
the sepulcher
that watches over everything.
Twin brother
to the one on the Nile
the tall Sphinx
the silent chamber’s
countenance.
And they marvel
at the regal head
that has silently
and forever
set the human face
to be weighed
on the scale
of the stars.
His sight, still dizzy
from early death
can’t grasp it.
But hers
frightens the owl
from behind the rim
of the crown.
And the bird
brushing with slow
downstrokes
along the cheek
— the one
with the roundest curve —
inscribes faintly
on the new sense of hearing
that follows death
an indescribable outline
as if on the doubly opened
page of a book.
And higher up, the stars.
New ones.
Stars of the Painlands.
Slowly, the Lament
tells him their names:
“Here — look:
the Rider
the Staff
and that dense constellation
they call the Fruitgarland.
Then further up
toward the Pole:
the Cradle, the Path
the Burning Book
the Puppet, the Window.
But in the southern sky
pure as within the palm
of a consecrated hand
the clear, shining M
that stands for the Mothers ….”
But the dead man
must go on
and silently
the older Lament
takes him as far as the gorge
where the spring
the source of Joy
shimmers in moonlight.
She names it with reverence
saying:
“In the world of men
this is a life-bearing stream.”
They stand
at the foot
of the mountain
and there
she embraces him
crying.
Alone, he goes off climbing
into the mountains
of primal Pain.
And not even
his footstep
rings from this soundless fate.
Yet if these
endlessly dead
awakened a simile for us
look, they might point
to the catkins
hanging from empty hazeltrees
or else they might mean the rain
that falls on the dark earth
in spring.
And we
who always think
of happiness rising
would feel the emotion
that almost startles us
when a happy thing falls.
DIE ERSTE ELEGIE
WER, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf
dunkelen Schluchzens. Ach, wen vermögen
wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht,
und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,
daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind
in der gedeuteten Welt. Es bleibt uns vielleicht
irgendein Baum an dem Abhang, daß wir ihn täglich
wiedersähen; es bleibt uns die Straße von gestern
und das verzogene Treusein einer Gewohnheit,
der es bei uns gefiel, und so blieb sie und ging nicht.
O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum
uns am Angesicht zehrt —, wem bliebe sie nicht, die ersehnte,
sanft enttäuschende, welche dem einzelnen Herzen
mühsam bevorsteht. Ist sie den Liebenden leichter?
Ach, sie verdecken sich nur miteinander ihr Los.
Weißt du’s noch nicht? Wirf aus den Armen die Leere
zu den Räumen hinzu, die wir atmen; vielleicht daß die Vögel
die erweiterte Luft fühlen mit innigerm Flug.
Ja, die Frühlinge brauchten dich wohl. Es muteten manche
Sterne dir zu, daß du sie spürtest. Es hob
sich eine Woge heran im Vergangenen, oder
da du vorüberkamst am geöffneten Fenster,
gab eine Geige sich hin. Das alles war Auftrag.
Aber bewältigtest du’s? Warst du nicht immer
noch von Erwartung zerstreut, als kündigte alles
eine Geliebte dir an? (Wo willst du sie bergen,
da doch die großen fremden Gedanken bei dir
aus und ein gehn und öfters bleiben bei Nacht.)
Sehnt es dich aber, so singe die Liebenden; lange
noch nicht unsterblich genug ist ihr berühmtes Gefühl.
Jene, du neidest sie fast, Verlassenen, die du
so viel liebender fandst als die Gestillten. Beginn’
immer von neuem die nie zu erreichende Preisung;
denk: es erhält sich der Held, selbst der Untergang war ihm
nur ein Vorwand, zu sein: seine letzte Geburt.
Aber die Liebenden nimmt die erschöpfte Natur
in sich zurück, als wären nicht zweimal die Kräfte,
dieses zu leisten. Hast du der Gaspara Stampa
denn genügend gedacht, daß irgendein Mädchen,
dem der Geliebte entging, am gesteigerten Beispiel
dieser Liebenden fühlt: daß ich würde wie sie?
Sollen nicht endlich uns diese ältesten Schmerzen
fruchtbarer werden? Ist es nicht Zeit, daß wir liebend
uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn:
wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im
Absprung
mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.
Stimmen, Stimmen.
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