With all its eyes the creature-world beholds
the open. But our eyes, as though reversed,
encircle it on every side, like traps
set round its unobstructed path to freedom.
What is outside, we know from the brute’s face
alone; for while a child is quite small we take it
and turn it round and force it to look backwards
at conformation, not that openness
so deep within the brute’s face. Free from death.
We only see death; the free animal
has its decease perpetually behind it
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
into eternity, like running springs.
We’ve never, no, not for a single day,
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into: always world,
and never nowhere without no: that pure,
unsuperintended element one breaths,
endlessly knows, and never craves. A child
sometimes gets quietly lost there, to be always
jogged back again. Or someone dies and is it.
For, nearing death, one perceives death no longer,
and stares ahead—perhaps with large brute gaze.
Lovers—were not the other present, always
spoiling the view!—draw near to it and wonder …
Behind the other, as though through oversight,
the thing is revealed … But no one gets beyond
the other, and so world returns once more.
Always facing Creation, we perceive there
only a mirroring of the free and open,
dimmed by our breath. Or that a dumb brute is calmly
raising its head to look us through and through.
That is what Destiny means: being opposite,
and nothing else, and always opposite.
Did consciousness such as we have exist
in the sure animal that moves towards us
upon a different course, the brute would drag us
round in its wake. But its own being for it
is infinite, inapprehensible,
unintrospective, pure, like its outward gaze.
Where we see Future, it sees Everything,
itself in Everything, for ever healed.
And yet, within the wakefully-warm beast
there lies the weight and care of a great sadness.
For that which often overwhelms us clings
to him as well,—a kind of memory
that what we are pressing after now was once
nearer and truer and attached to us
with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,
there it was breath. Compared with that first home
the second seems ambiguous and draughty.
Oh bliss of tiny creatures that remain
for ever in the womb that brought them forth!
Joy of the gnat, that can still leap within,
even on its wedding-day: for womb is all.
Look at the half-assurance of the bird,
through origin almost aware of both,
like one of those Etruscan souls, escaped
from a dead man enclosed within a space
on which his resting figure forms a lid.
And how dismayed is any womb-born thing
that has to fly! As though it were afraid
of its own self, it zigzags through the air
like crack through cup. The way the track of a bat
goes rending through the evening is porcelain.
And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. it decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.
Who is turned us round like this, so that we always,
do what we may, retain the attitude
of someone who is departing? Just as he,
on the last hill, that shows him all this valley
for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,
we live our lives, for ever taking leave.