I have dead ones, and I let them go
And was astonished to see them so comforted
So quickly at home in being dead, so at ease,
So different from their reputation. You alone, you come
Back; you brush against me, you move around, you want
To bump up against something so it makes a sound
And discloses you. O do not take from me what I
Slowly come to know. I am right; you err
When you, moved, have a homesickness
For any thing. We transfigure it:
It is not here, we reflect it out from within
Our being as soon as we recognize it.
I believed you to be much further along. It confuses me,
That it is you who comes and goes, you who
Has transfigured more than any other woman.
That we were startled when you died, no, that
Your strong death kept us in darkness,
Ripped the up-until-then away from the since-then,
That is our business; coming to terms with it
Will be our task that we pursue in all things.
But that you yourself were startled and even now
Are startled, where fright and shock no longer take place;
That you lose a piece of your eternity
And enter in here, friend, here
Where everything is not yet; that you, dispersed,
Dispersed for the first time in the universe and half,
That you do not grasp the course of unending natures
like you grasped every thing here;
that out of the cycle that already received you,
the silent heaviness of some disquiet
pulls you down to a time already counted out—
that awakens me at night often like a thief breaking in.
And if only I could say that you are just resting,
That you come out of generosity, out of an overflow,
Because you are so certain, so secure in yourself
That you wander around like a child, unafraid
Of places where someone might do you harm—
But no: you are pleading. This cuts me
To the bone and goes through me like a saw.
A reproach that you were to carry as a ghost
Would come after me, when I retire at night,
Into my lungs, into my gut,
Into the last poorest chamber of my heart,
But such a reproach would not be as terrible
As your pleading is. For what are you pleading?
Tell me, shall I travel? Have you left behind
Some thing somewhere that is struggling
And wants to return to you? Should I go to a country
That you did not see, though it was related to you
Like the other half of your soul?
I want to travel its rivers, want to
Go on land and ask about old customs.
I want to speak with the women in the doorways
And watch when they call their children.
I want to observe how they put on the landscape
Outside in the old task
Of the meadows and fields, I want to demand
To be taken to their king,
And want to bribe the priests
So they bring me to the strongest divine statue
And then leave and close the temple gates.
Then, once I know much, I just want to
Watch the animals, so that something
Of their movements slides over into my
Limbs, I want to have a short existence
In their eyes, so they hold me
And slowly let me be, calmly, without judgment.
I want to have the gardeners recite
Many flowers to me, that I may bring back
With me a remnant of the hundred odors
In the shards of their beautiful proper names.
And I want to buy fruits, fruits, in which
The land is once more, up to the sky.
For you understood this: the full fruits.
You laid them in bowls before you
And balanced their heaviness with colors.
And you saw the women like fruits
And saw the children so, driven inwardly
Into the forms of their being.
And you saw yourself as a fruit,
Took yourself out of your clothes, carried
Yourself before the mirror, let yourself in
Into your looking, which remained high above
And did not say: that is me; but: that is.
So much without curious desire was your looking,
And so possessionless, of such a true poverty,
That it no longer desired you yourself. Holy.
I want to keep you as you
Presented yourself to yourself in the mirror, deep within
and away from everything. Why do you come differently [now]?
What draws you back? Why do you want
To persuade me that in those amber beads
Around your neck is still some heaviness
Of that heaviness that is never there in the beyond
Of images at rest; why do you show me
In your behavior a foreboding;
What forces you to interpret the contours of
Your body like the lines of a hand,
So that I cannot see it anymore without [feeling a sense of] fate?
Come here into the candlelight. I am not afraid
To look at the dead. If they come,
They have a right to put themselves in our gaze, like other things.
Come here, let us be still for a while.
Look at this rose on my writing desk;
Is not the light around it exactly as timid
As around you; it too should perhaps not be here.
Outside in the garden, unmixed with me,
It should have stayed or it should have gone—
Now it remains like this. What is my consciousness to it?
Do not be startled if I now understand, ah,
Now it arises within me: I cannot do differently,
I must understand, even if I were to die from it.
To understand, that you are here. I understand.
Just as a blind man understands around a thing,
I feel your lot and know no name for it.
Let us lament together that someone
Took you out of your mirror. Can you still weep?
You cannot. The force and the welling of your tears
You have transformed into your mature gaze
And you undertook to transform every juice within you
Into a strong existence
That rises and circles in balance, blindly.
Then chance snatched you, your last chance
Snatched you back out of your furthest progess,
Back into a world where juices want [to be].
Did not snatch you whole, snatched only a piece at first
But as reality so increased around this piece
From day to day that it became heavy,
Then you needed yourself entire: then you went
And brought yourself out of the law in fragments,
Laboriously, because you needed yourself. Then
You carried yourself away and dug out of
The night-warm earth-kingdom of your heart
The seeds, still green, out of which your death should bud: yours,
Your own death for your own life.
And you ate them, the seeds of your death
Like all others, you ate its seeds
And had an aftertaste of sweetness within you
That you did not expect, you had sweet lips,
You who were already sweet inwardly in the senses.
O let us lament. Do you know how your blood
Came back from its incomparable route, reluctant and
Unwilling, when you retrieved it?
How it, confused, took up once again the small circulation
Of your body; how it, full of mistrust
And amazement, stepped into the placenta
And was suddenly tired from the long path back.
You drove it on, you prodded it on,
You dragged it to the fireplace, as
One drags a herd of animals to the sacrifice;
And you still wanted that it should be happy about it.
And you finally forced it: it was happy
And ran on and devoted itself. It seemed to you,
Because you were accustomed to other measures,
That it would only be a short while; but
Now you were in time, and time is long.
And time goes on, and time increases, and time
Is like the recurrence of a long sickness.
How short your life was, when you compare it
To those hours when you sat and
silently weighed the many forces of your much future
against the new child-sprout
that was also destiny. O woeful task.
O task above all power. You did
It day after day, you trudged to it
And pulled the beautiful weft out of the loom
And needed all your threads differently.
And in the end you still had courage for the festival.
For when it was done, you wanted to be rewarded,
Like children when they have drunk
Bittersweet tea that might make them healthy.
So you rewarded yourself: for you were too far from
Anyone else, as now too; no one would have
Been able to think up which reward would do you good.
You knew it. You sat up in the childbed,
And before you stood a mirror that gave you
Everything back. Now that was all you
And entirely before you, and inwardly there was only illusion,
The beautiful illusion of every woman who likes to
Change jewelry and combs her hair and changes.
Thus you died like women died in earlier times,
Old-fashioned you died in the warm house
The death of women in childbed, who want
To close themselves again and cannot do it,
Because that darkness that they bore with the child
Comes once again and pushes and enters.
Should we nevertheless have summoned
Mourners? Women who weep
For money and whom one can pay so that
They wail through the night when all is still.
Bring on the customs! We do not have enough
Customs. Everything goes away and is betrayed.
Thus you must come, dead, and here with me
Make up the mourning. Do you hear that I mourn?
I would like to throw my voice like a shawl
Over the shards of your death
And pull at it until it is in tatters,
And everything that I say would go so ragged
Into this voice and would freeze
If it all remained mourning. But now I also accuse:
Not the one who pulled you out of yourself
(I cannot discern him, he is like everyone),
But I accuse everyone in him: the man.
If somewhere a having-been-a-child arises
Deep within me that I do not yet know,
Perhaps the purest child-being of my childhood:
I do not want to know it. I want to form
An angel out of it without looking
And want to throw it into the first row of crying
Angels that reminisce God.
For this suffering has already lasted too long
And no one can bear it; it is too heavy for us,
The confused suffering of false love
Which, building on lapses of time as habit,
Names itself the right and grows out of the wrong.
Where is a man who has the right to ownership?
Who can own what does not preserve itself,
What from time to time simply catches
Itself and throws itself away again like a child a ball.
As little as the commander can hold on to
A statue of Nike on the fore-bow of a ship
When the secret lightness of being of the divinity
Suddenly lifts them away in the light sea-wind:
So little can one of us call the woman
Who does not see us anymore and who
Travels on the narrow strip of her existence
Like a miracle, without mishap:
If he could, occupation and pleasure would become guilt.
For this is guilt, if there is any guilt at all:
Not to increase the freedom of a beloved
With respect to every freedom that one summons up in oneself.
For we have, where we love, only this:
To let each other be; for that we hold to one another,
That is easy for us and does not need to be learned.
Are you still here? In what corner are you?—
You have known so much of all of this
And were able to do so much when you went
Around open to everything like a day just dawning.
The women suffer: to love means to be alone,
And artists sometimes sense in their work
That where they love they have to transfigure.
You began both; both is in that
Which now distorts a reputation, which now takes it away from you.
Ah, you were far from that reputation. You were
Inconspicuous; you had quietly taken in your beauty
As one pulls in a flag in the gray morning of a work day
And you wanted nothing but a long task,—
Which is not complete: for all that, not complete.
If you are still here, if in this darkness
There is still a place in which your spirit
Delicately resonates on the shallow soundwaves
That a voice, lonely in the night,
Raises in the currents of an upper room,
Then hear me: Help me. Look, thus we slide back,
Not knowing when, from our progress
Into something that we do not intend, in which
We entangle ourselves as in a dream
And in which we die without awakening.
No one is further along. To everyone who raised up
His blood into a work that lasts long
It can happen that he does not hold it up
And that it goes according to its weight, worthless.
For somewhere there is an old enmity
Between life and the great work.
That I may apprehend this work and say it, help me.
Like that which is farthest away sometimes helps: in me.
Do not come back. If you can bear it, be
Dead among the dead. The dead are occupied.
But help me in a way that does not distract you,
Like that which is farthest away sometimes helps: in me.