Still the flood bears the sky’s golden burden.
A little fish flashes past and fades;
A waxen face flows through the elders.
In gardens bells sink long and muted
A little bird trills as if insane.
The gentle corn swells silent and rapt
And bees gather still in earnest industry.
Come now love to the weary labourer!
Into his hut a mild beam falls.
The forest streams through evening sour and sallow
Now and then buds cheerfully crackle.
III
How all that comes into being seems so sick!
A breath of fever encircles a hamlet;
Yet from branches beckons a gentle spirit
And opens the heart wide and fearful.
An outpour of blooming so quietly trickles away
And the unborn fosters his own repose.
The lovers bloom towards their stars
And sweeter flows their breath on the night.
So bitter good and true is, what lives;
And softly an old stone grazes you:
Truly! I will always be with you.
O mouth! that quivers through the white willow.
Suburb in the Föhn
At evening the place is desolate and brown,
The air heavy with a greyish foul stench.
Thunder of a train from the arch of a bridge—
And sparrows flutter over bush and fence.
Huddles of huts, paths scattering wildly,
In gardens confusion and movement,
Sometimes out of this dull stirring rises a howl,
In a band of children a red dress flies.
A rat choir whistles amorously by the swill.
In baskets the women bear the entrails,
Rank procession of squalor and filth,
They emerge out of the dusk.
Suddenly a sewer spews fatty blood
From the abbatoir into the calm river.
To the sparse shrubs the Föhn lends colour
And slowly red creeps through the flood.
A whisper, that drowns in troubled sleep.
Figures loom above the dykes,
Perhaps memories of a former life,
That on warm breezes rise and fall.
From clouds plunge shimmering avenues,
Filled with fine coaches and bold riders.
Then you see too a ship founder on rocks
And sometimes rose-coloured mosques.
The Rats
In the courtyard the autumn moon shines white.
From the roof’s edge grotesque shadows fall.
A silence dwells in empty windows;
Where softly the rats rush upwards
And, whistling, scurry here and there
And a greyish whiff of haze wafts
After them from the privy, through which
The moonlight quivers spectrally.
And insatiably they squabble as if insane
Crowding into house and barns,
Swollen with fruit and grain.
In the darkness icy winds complain.
Dejection
World calamity ghosts through afternoon.
Huts flee through little gardens brown and forlorn.
Cinders dance around burnt manure,
Two sleepers stagger homewards, grey and obscure.
On the withered pasture a child runs
And plays with his eyes black and smooth.
Gold drips from bushes sombre and bleak.
An old man turns sadly in the wind.
At evening once more above my head
Saturn mutely steers a wretched fate.
A tree, a dog steps back on itself
And God’s heaven sways black and defoliated.
A little fish glides swiftly down the stream;
And softly stirs the dead friend’s hand
And lovingly smoothes brow and garment.
A light summons shadows in rooms to awaken.
Whispered in the Afternoon
Sun, autumnal tenuous and shy,
And the fruit drops from the trees.
In blue rooms silence dwells
A drawn-out afternoon.
The dying sound of metal;
And a white beast breaks down.
Coarse songs of brown girls
Have blown away in falling leaves.
The brow dreams God’s colours,
Senses the soft wings of madness.
Shadows turn on the hill
Blackly bordered by decay.
Twilight filled with rest and wine;
Mournful guitars flow.
And to the mellow lamp within
You turn as in a dream.
Psalm
For Karl Kraus
There is a light, which the wind has extinguished.
There is an inn on the heath, which a drunk abandons in the afternoon.
There is a vineyard, black and burnt with holes full of spiders.
There is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk.
The madman has perished. There is an island of the South Sea,
To receive the sun god. Drums are beaten.
The men lead warlike dances.
The women hip-sway in creepers and fire-flowers,
When the sea sings. O our lost paradise.
The nymphs have left the golden forests.
The stranger is buried. Then a shimmering rain arises.
The son of Pan appears as an earth-worker,
Who sleeps through noon against the glowing asphalt.
There are little girls in a courtyard in tiny frocks full of heart-rending want.
There are rooms filled with accords and sonatas.
There are shadows which embrace before a blind mirror.
At the windows of hospitals convalescents warm themselves.
A white steamer carries the bloody epidemic along the canal.
The strange sister again appears in someone’s evil dreams.
Resting in the hazel bush, she plays with his stars.
The student, perhaps a double, follows her from the window for a long time.
Behind him stands his dead brother, or else he descends the old spiral staircase.
In darkness brown chestnut trees make pallid the figure of the young novice.
The garden is in evening. Bats flutter about the cloister.
The caretaker’s children surrender play and seek the gold of heaven.
Final chord of a quartet. The little blind girl runs trembling along the avenue,
And later her shadow gropes its way along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends.
There is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal at evening.
In the gloom of the old asylum human ruins decay.
The dead orphans lie by the garden wall.
From grey rooms step angels with shit-spattered wings.
Worms drip from their yellowed lids.
The square before the church is dark and silent, as in the days of childhood.
On silver soles former lives glide by
And the shadows of the damned decline towards sighing waters.
In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.
Silently above the place of skulls God’s golden eyes are opening.
Rosary Songs
TO THE SISTER
Where you go becomes autumn and evening,
Blue deer, that sounds under trees,
Lonely pond at evening.
Quietly sounds the flight of birds,
Melancholy above the arches of your eyes.
Your narrow smile sounds.
God has curved your eyelids.
At night the stars seek, Good Friday’s child,
The arch of your brow.
NEARNESS OF DEATH
(version 2)
O the evening, that enters the dark hamlets of childhood.
&nb
sp; The pond beneath the willows
Fills with the blighted sighs of melancholy.
O the forest, which softly lowers brown eyes,
As from the lonely one’s bony hands
The crimson of his rapturous days sinks down.
O the nearness of death. Let us pray.
In this night on warm cushions
Yellowed with incense the frail limbs of lovers break free.
AMEN
Rot gliding through the decayed room;
Shadows on yellow wallpaper; in dark mirrors
The ivory sorrow of our hands is arched.
Brown beads trickle through dead fingers.
In the stillness
An angel’s opiate eyes of blue.
Blue also is the evening;
The hour of our demise, Azrael’s shadow,
Darkening a little brown garden.
Decay
(version 2)
At evening, when the bells chime peace,
I follow the marvellous flight of birds,
That in long multitudes, like processions of pious pilgrims,
Vanish into the clear vastness of autumn.
Wandering through the dusk-filled garden,
I dream towards their brighter destinies
And scarcely sense the hour hand’s motion.
Thus I follow their journey over the clouds.
Then a waft of decay has me shudder.
The blackbird laments in leafless branches.
The red wine sways on rusty trellises.
As like the death roundelay of pale children
Around dark, weathered fountain edges,
Trembling blue asters bow in the wind.
In the Homeland
Mignonette scent strays through the sick window;
An old square, chestnut trees black and desolate.
A golden beam breaks through the roof and flows
Over the siblings, dreamlike and confused.
Decay drifts in the dishwater, gently coos
The Föhn through the brown garden; very still
The sunflower savours its gold and melts away.
Through blue air clangs the call of the guard.
Mignonette scent. The walls dusk bleakly.
The sister’s sleep is heavy. The night wind burrows
Through her hair bathed in lunar brilliance.
The cat’s shadow glides blue and slender
From the ramshackle roof that borders near affliction,
The candle flame that rises crimson.
An Autumn Evening
To Karl Röck
The brown village. A darkness is often reflected
Striding along walls that stand in autumn,
Figures: man and woman, the dead pass
Into cool rooms to make ready their bed.
Here boys play. Heavy shadows broaden
Over brown manure. Maidservants walk
Through moist blueness and sometimes they search
Out of eyes filled with night-chimes.
For the solitary there is a tavern;
That waits patiently beneath dark arches,
Where golden tobacco clouds drift.
Yet always the self is dark and near.
The drunk muses in the shadow of old arches
On wild birds drawn into the distance.
Human Wretchedness
(version 2)
The clock, which strikes five before the sun—
A dark horror grips the lonely ones,
In the evening garden bleak trees swish.
The dead one’s face stirs at the window.
Perhaps, this hour stands still.
Before dulled eyes blue images juggle
To the rhythm of ships that sway on the river.
On the quay, a train of nuns drifts past.
In the hazel bush girls play pale and blind,
Like lovers, who in sleep entwine.
Perhaps there are flies singing about a carrion there,
Perhaps in mother’s lap an infant also sobs.
From hands sink asters blue and red,
The youth’s mouth slips away strange and wise;
And eyelids flutter unsettled with angst and quiet;
Through fever blackness wafts an aroma of bread.
It seems, you hear also hideous shrieking;
Through decayed wall bones glimmer.
An evil heart laughs loudly in beautiful rooms;
A dog darts past a dreamer.
An empty casket is lost in the darkness.
A room seeks to light up for the murderer,
While by night lanterns are smashed in the storm.
Laurel graces the noble one’s white temple.
In the Village
I
From brown walls a village, a field steps.
A shepherd decays upon an old stone.
The soft leaves that fall in stillness.
The peasants’ brows all brown, long sounds
The evening bell; beauty in pious customs,
The saviour’s black head in the thorn bush,
The cool room that death reconciles.
How pale the mothers are. Blue sinks
On glass and chest, the pride their mind preserves;
Also a white head inclines high aged
Over the grandchild who drinks milk and stars.
II
The poor one, who lonely in spirit passed on,
Rises waxen over an old path.
The apple trees sink down stark and calm
Into the colours of their fruit that blackly corrupts.
Still the roof of dried straw arches
Over the slumber of cows. The blind maidservant
Appears in the yard; a blue water laments;
The skull of a horse stares from the rotten gate.
With dark soul the imbecile speaks a word
Of love, which dies out in the black bush,
Where the other stands as a tender dream form.
In moister blue the evening resounds.
III
At the window tap branches stripped by the Föhn.
A savage aching grows in the peasant woman’s womb.
Through her arms trickles black snow;
Golden-eyed owls flutter about her head.
The walls stare bleak and caked with filth
In cool darkness. In the fever bed
The pregnant belly goes cold, ogled brazenly by the moon.
A dog has breathed its last before her room.
Three men step darkly through the gate
With scythes, broken in the field.
The red evening wind rattles through the window;
From which steps a black angel.
Song of Evening
At evening, when we take the dark paths,
Before us our pale forms appear.
When we thirst,
We drink the white water of the pond,
The sweetness of our sorrow-filled childhood.
Faded away, we rest beneath elder bushes,
Gaze at grey gulls.
Springtime clouds rise over the dark city,
That silences the nobler time of monks.
When I took your slender hands
Softly you opened round eyes,
Long ago.
But when the dark melody haunts my soul,
You appear white in the landscape of autumn.
Three Glances into an Opal
To Erhard Buschbeck
I
Glance into an opal: a village wreathed in withered vines,
Stillness of grey clouds, yellow rocky mounds
And coolness of evening springs: twin mirrors
Framed by shadows and slimy stones.
Autumn paths and crosses settle into evening,
Singing pilgrims and blood-stained linen.
Thus the figure of the solitary turns inwards
&nbs
p; And travels, a pale angel through the deserted grove.
From blackness blows the Föhn. With satyrs
The slender young women unite; monks, pale, lustful priests,
Their madness embellished with dark and lovely lilies
And hands lift to the golden shrine of God.
II
Rosy a dewdrop hangs, moistening
The Rosemary: a stench of graves leaks away,
Hospitals, swollen with the insanity of fever moans and curses.
From the grey and mouldered family vault a skeleton ascends.
In blue haze and slime the old man’s wife dances,
Her filth-stiffened hair brimming with black tears,
Boys dream wildly amidst barren willow fronds
Their brows bare and raw with leprosy.
Through the arched window evening settles balmy and mild.
A saint steps from his wounds’ black scars.
Crimson snails crawl from broken shells
And spurt blood into stiffened grey thorn snarls.
III