I have my dead, and I would let them go
and be surprised to see them all so cheerful,
so soon at home in being-dead, so right,
so unlike their repute. You, you alone,
return; brush past me, move about, persist
in knocking something that vibratingly
betrays you. Oh, don’t take from me what I
am slowly learning. I’m right; you’re mistaken,
if you’re disturbed into a home-sick longing
for something here. We transmute it all;
it’s not here, we reflect it from ourselves,
from our own being, as soon as we perceive it.
I thought you’d got much further. It confounds me
that you should thus mistake and come, who passed
all other women so in transmutation.
That we were frightened when you died, or, rather,
that your strong death made a dark interruption,
tearing the till-then from the ever-since;
that is our business: to set that in order
will be the work that everything provides us.
But that you too were frightened, even now
are frightened, now, when fright has lost its meaning,
that you are losing some of your eternity,
even a little, to step in here, friend, here,
where nothing yet exists; that in the All,
for the first time distracted and half-hearted,
you did not grasp the infinite ascension
as once you grasped each single thing on earth;
that from the orbit that already held you
the gravitation of some mute unrest
should drag you down to measurable time:
this often wakes me like an entering thief.
If I could say you merely deign to come
from magnanimity, from superabundance,
because you are so sure, so self-possessed,
that you can wander like a child, not frightened
of places where ther’re things that happen to one:-
but no, you’re asking. And that penetrates
right to the bone and rattles like a saw.
Reproach, such as you might bear as a spirit,
bear against me when I withdraw myself
at night into my lungs, into my bowels,
into the last poor chamber of my heart,
such a reproach would not be half so cruel
as this mute asking. What is it you ask?
Say, shall I travel? Have you left somewhere
a thing behind you, that torments itself
with trying to reach you? Travel to a country
you never saw, although it was as closely
akin to you as one half of your senses?
I’ll voyage on its rivers, set my foot
upon its soil and ask about old customs,
stand talking with the women in their doorways
and pay attention when they call their children.
I will observe how they take on the landscape
outside there in the course of the old labour
of field and meadow; will express a wish
to be presented to the king himself,
and work upon the priests with bribery
to leave me lying before the strongest statue
and then withdraw, shutting the temple doors.
But in conclusion, having learnt so much,
I’ll simply watch the animals, that something
of their own way of turning may glide over
into my joints; I’ll have a brief existence
within their eyes, that solemnly retain me
and slowly loose me, calmly, without judgement.
I’ll make the gardeners repeat by heart
the names of many flowers and so bring back
in pots of lovely proper names a remnant,
a little remnant, of the hundred perfumes.
And I will purchase fruits too, fruits, wherein
that country, sky and all, will re-exist.
For that was what you understood: full fruits.
You used to set them out in bowls before you
and counterpoise their heaviness with colours.
And women too appeared to you as fruits,
and children too, both of them from within
impelled into the forms of their existence.
And finally you saw yourself as fruit,
lifted yourself out of your clothes and carried
that self before the mirror, let it in
up to your gaze; which remained, large, in front,
and did not say: that’s me; no, but: this is.
So unenquiring was your gaze at last,
so unpossessive and so truly poor,
it wanted even you no longer: holy.
That’s how I would retain you, as you placed
yourself within the mirror, deep within,
and far from all else. Why come differently?
Why thus revoke yourself? Why are you trying
to make me feel that in those amber beads
around your neck there was still something heavy
with such a heaviness as never lurks
in the beyond of tranquil pictures? Why
does something in your bearing bode misfortune?
What makes you read the contours of your body
like lines upon a hand, and me no longer
able to see them but as destiny?
Come to the candle-light. I’m not afraid
to look upon the dead. When they return
they have a right to hospitality
within our gaze, the same as other things.
Come; we’ll remain a little while in silence.
Look at this rose, here, on my writing-desk:
is not the light around it just as timid
as that round you? It too should not be here.
It ought to have remained or passed away
out in the garden there, unmixed with me,-
it stays, unconcious of my conciousness.
Don’t be afraid now if I comprehend:
it’s rising in me – oh, I must, I must,
even if it kills me, I must comprehend.
Comprehend, that you’re here. I comprehend.
Just as a blind man comprehends a thing,
I feel your fate although I cannot name it.
Let both of us lament that someone took you
out of your mirror. If you still can cry?
No, you can’t cry. You long ago tranformed
the force and thrust of tears to your ripe gazing,
and were in an act of changing every kind
of sap within you to a strong existence
that mounts and cirles in blind equipoise.
Then, for the last time, chance got hold of you,
and snatched you back out of your farthest progress,
back to a world where saps will have their way.
Did not snatch all, only a piece at first,
but when reality, from day to day,
so swelled around that piece that it grew heavy,
you needed your whole self; then off you went
and broke yourself in fragments from your law,
laboriously, needing yourself. And then
you took yourself away and from your heart’s
warm, night-warm, soil you dug the yet green seeds
your death was going to spring from: you own death,
the death appropriate to your own life.
And then you ate those grains of your own death
like any others, ate them one by one,
and had within yourself an after-taste
of unexpected sweetness, had sweet lips,
you: in your senses sweet within already.
Let us lament. Do you know how unwilling
and hesitatingly your blood returned,
recalled from an incomparable orbit?
With what confusion it took up again
the tiny circulation of the body?
With what mistrust it entered the placenta,
suddenly tired from the long homeward journey?
You drove it on again, you pushed it forward,
you dragged it to the hearth, as people drag
a herd of animals to sacrifice;
and spite of all desired it to be happy.
And finally you forced it: it was happy,
and ran up and surrendered. You supposed,
being so accustomed to the other measures,
that this was only for a little while;
but now you were in time, and time is long.
And time goes by, and time goes on, and time
is like relapsing after some long illness.
How very short your life, when you compare it
with hours you used to sit in silence, bending
the boundless forces of your boundless future
out of their course to the new germination,
that became fate once more. O painful labour.
Labour beyond all strength. And you performed it
day after day, you dragged yourself along to it
and pulled the lovely woof out of the loom
and wove your threads into another pattern.
And still had spirit for a festival.
For when you’d done you looked for some reward,
like children, when they’ve drunk a nasty drink
of bitter-sweet tea that may make one better.
You gave your own reward, being still so distant,
even then, from all the rest; and no one there
who could have hit on a reward to please you.
You yourself knew it. You sat up in child-bed,
a mirror there before you, that returned
all that you gave. Now everything was you,
and right in front; within was mere deceit,
the sweet deceit of Everywoman, gladly
putting her jewels on and doing her hair.
And so you died like women long ago,
died in the old warm house, old-fashionedly,
the death of those in child-bed, who are trying
to close themselves again but cannot do it,
because that darkness which they also bore
returns and grows importunate and enters.
Ought they not, though, to have gone and hunted up
some mourners for you? Women who will weep
for money, and, if paid sufficiently,
will howl through a whole night when all is still.
Observances! We haven’t got enough
observances. All vanishes in talk.
That’s why you have to come back, and with me
retrieve omitted mourning. Can you hear me?
I’d like to fling my voice out like a cloth
over the broken fragments of your death
and tug at it till it was all in tatters,
and everything I said was forced to go
clad in the rags of that torn voice and freeze –
if mourning were enough. But i accuse:
not him who thus withdrew you from yourself
(I can’t distinguish him, he’s like them all),
but in him I accuse all: accuse man.
If something deep within me rises up
and having-once-been-child I don’t yet know,
perhaps the purest childness of my childhood:
I will not know it. Without looking at it
or asking, I will make an angel of it,
and hurl that angel to the foremost rank
of crying angels that remembrance God.
For now too long this suffering has lasted,
and none can stand it; it’s too hard for us,
this tortuous suffering caused by spurious love,
which, building on prescription like a habit,
calls itself just and battens on injustice.
Where is the man who justly may possess?
Who can possess what cannot hold itself
but only now and then blissfully catches
and flings itself on like a child a ball?
As little as the admiral can retain
the nikê poised upon his vessel’s prow
when the mysterious lightness of her godhead
has caught her up into the limpid sea-wind,
can one of us call back to him the woman
who, seeing us no longer, takes her way
along some narrow strip of her existence,
as though a miracle, without mischance –
unless his calling and delight were guilt.
For this is guilt, if anything be guilt,
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the freedom in one’s own possession.
All we can offer where we love is this:
to loose each other; for to hold each other
comes easy to us and requires no learning.
Are you still there? Still hiding in some corner? –
You knew so much of all that I’ve been saying,
and could so much too, for you passed through life
open to all things, like a breaking day.
Women suffer: loving means being lonely,
and artists feel at times within their work
the need, where most they love, for transmutation.
You began both; and both exist in that
which fame, detaching it from you, disfigures.
Oh, you were far beyond all fame. Were in-
conspicuous; had gently taken in
your beauty as a gala flag’s intaken
on the grey morning of a working-day,
and wanted nothing but a lengthy work, –
which is not done; in spite of all, not done.
If you’re still there, if somewhere in this darkness
there’s still a spot where your perceptive spirit’s
vibrating on the shallow waves of sound
a lonely voice within a lonely night
starts in the air-stream of a lofty room:
hear me and help me. Look, without knowing when,
we keep on slipping backwards from our progress
into some unintended thing, and there
we get ourselves involved as in a dream,
and there at last we die without awakening.
No one’s got further. Anyone who’s lifted
the level of his blood to some long work
may find he’s holding it aloft no longer
and that it’s worthlessly obeying its weight.
For somewhere there’s an old hostility
between our human life and greatest work.
May I see into it and it say: help me!
Do not return. If you can bear it, stay
dead with the dead. The dead are occupied.
But help me, as you may without distraction,
as the most distant sometimes helps: in me.