5 April 1923
10
With other people – in heaps
of roses – in bits of weeks
only guessed at…
I remain
yours, like a chosen bundle,
even as the wind picks me up
like sand or gravel, and the rails
– overhearing me – send my dust
out to breadless provinces.
Do you recognise this shawl? Hotter
than Hell gates when pulled across
a freezing body –
look, I fling it open.
Below the hem: the miracle of a child.
It is Song itself! And with this first-born,
greater than any Rachel, with –
my own imagination I dislodge
this stubborn sediment.
11 April 1923
Sahara
Young men, don’t ride away! Sand
stifled the soul of the
last one to disappear and now
he’s altogether dumb.
To look for him is useless.
(Young men, I never lie.)
That lost one now reposes
in a reliable grave.
He once rode into me as if
through lands of
miracles and fire, with all
the power of poetry, and
I was: dry, sandy, without day.
He used poetry
to invade my depths, like those of
any other country!
Listen to this story of two
souls, without jealousy:
we entered one another’s eyes
as if they were oases –
I took him into me as if he were
a god, in passion,
simply because of a charming tremor
in his young throat.
Without a name he sank into me. But now
he’s gone. Don’t search for him.
All deserts forget the thousands of
those who sleep in them.
And afterwards the Sahara in one
seething collapse will
cover you also with sand like sprinkled
foam. And be your hill!
1923
The Poet
1
A poet’s speech begins a great way off.
A poet is carried far away by speech
by way of planets, signs, and the ruts
of roundabout parables, between yes and no,
in his hands even sweeping gestures from a bell-tower
become hook-like. For the way of comets
is the poet’s way. And the blown-apart
links of causality are his links. Look up
after him without hope. The eclipses of
poets are not foretold in the calendar.
He is the one that mixes up the cards
and confuses arithmetic and weight,
demands answers from the school bench,
the one who altogether refutes Kant,
the one in the stone graves of the Bastille
who remains like a tree in its loveliness.
And yet the one whose traces have always vanished,
the train everyone always arrives
too late to catch
for the path of comets
is the path of poets: they burn without warming,
pick without cultivating. They are: an explosion, a breaking in –
and the mane of their path makes the curve of a
graph cannot be foretold by the calendar.
2
There are superfluous people about in
this world, out of sight, who
aren’t listed in any directory; and
home for them is a rubbish heap.
They are hollow, jostled creatures:
who keep silent, dumb as dung, they are
nails catching in your silken hem,
dirt imagined under your wheels.
Here they are, ghostly and invisible, the
sign is on them, like the speck of the leper.
People like Job in this world who
might even have envied him. If.
We are poets, which has the sound of outcast.
Nevertheless, we step out from our shores.
We dare contend for godhead, with goddesses,
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
Appointment
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
Rails
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
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
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.
&nb
sp; 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
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
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
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
POEM OF THE MOUNTAIN
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 mar
keting 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.