It is a light, which the wind has extinguished.

It is a village inn, which a drunkard abandons in the afternoon.

It is a vineyard, burned and black with holes full of spiders.

It is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk.

The lunatic is dead. It is an island of the South Pacific,

To receive the sun god. One beats the drums.

The men perform warlike dances.

The women sway the hips between climbing plants and fire flowers

When the sea sings. O our lost paradise.

The nymphs have left the golden forests.

One buries the stranger. Then a glimmering rain begins.

The son of Pan appears in the guise of an excavator,

Who sleeps away the midday near the glowing asphalt.

There are small girls in a courtyard in little dresses full of heartbreaking poverty!

There are rooms fulfilled with chords and sonatas.

There are shadows that embrace before a blind mirror.

By the windows of the hospital convalescents warm themselves.

A white steamboat in the canal bears bloody epidemics along.

The strange sister appears again in someone’s evil dreams.

Resting in the hazel bush, she plays with his stars.

The student, possibly a double, looks long after her from the window.

His dead brother stands behind him, or he descends the old spiral staircase.

In the darkness of brown chestnuts the figure of the young novice grows pale.

The garden is in evening. In the cloister the bats flutter about.

The children of the caretaker stop to play and search the gold of heaven.

Closing chords of a quartet. The small blind girl runs trembling through the avenue,

And later her shadow gropes along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends.

It is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal in the evening.

In the somberness of the old asylum human ruins decay.

The dead orphans lie by the garden wall.

From gray rooms angels step with excrement-splattered wings.

Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids.

The plaza before the church is sinister and taciturn, like in the days of childhood.

On silver soles former lives glide past

And the shadows of the damned descend to the sighing waters.

In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.

Taciturnly over the place of skulls God’s golden eyes open.