Inspiration, rosy sky,
black house, with a single window,
fiery. Oh, that sky
drunk up by the fiery window!
Trash of solitary outskirts,
weedy little stalk with teardrop,
skull of happiness, long, slender,
like the skull of a borzoi.
What’s the matter with me? Self-lost,
melting in the air and sunset,
muttering and almost fainting
on the waste at eveningtime.
Never did I want so much to cry.
Here it is, deep down in me.
The desire to bring it forth intact,
slightly filmed with moisture and so tremulous,
never yet had been so strong in me.
Do come out, my precious being,
cling securely to a stem,
to the window, still celestial,
or to the first lighted lamp.
Maybe empty is the world, and brutal;
nothing do I know—except
that it’s worthwhile being born
for the sake of this your breath.
It once was easier and simpler:
two rhymes—and my notebook I’d open.
How hazily I got to know you
in my presumptuous youth!
Leaning my elbows on the railing
of verse that glided like a bridge,
already I imagined that my soul
had started moving, started gliding,
and would keep drifting to the very stars.
But when transcribed in a fair copy,
deprived of magic instantly,
how helplessly behind each other
the leaden-weighted words would hide!
My young loneliness
in the night among motionless boughs!
The amazement of night over the river,
which reflects it in full;
and lilac bloom, the pale darling
of my first inexperienced numbers,
with that fabulous moonlight upon it!
And the paths of the park in half-mourning,
and-enlarged at present by memory,
twice as solid and beautiful now,
the old house, and the deathless flame
of the kerosene lamp in the window;
and in sleep the nearing of bliss,
a far breeze, an aerial envoy
with increasing noise penetrating dense woods,
inclining a branch at last—
all that time had seemed to have taken,
but you pause, and again it shines through,
for its lid was not tight—and no longer
can one take it away from you.
Blinking, a fiery eye looks,
through the fingerlike black stacks
of a factory, at weedy flowers
and a deformed tin can.
Across the vacant lot in darkening dust
I glimpse a sender hound with snow-white coat.
Lost, I presume. But in the distance sounds
insistently and tenderly a whistling,
And in the twilight toward me a man
comes, calls. I recognize
your energetic stride. You haven’t
changed much since you died.