But tell me, who are they, these acrobats, even a little
more fleeting than we ourselves,—so urgently, ever since childhood,
wrung by an (oh, for the sake of whom?)
never-contented will? That keeps on wringing them,
bending them, slinging them, swinging them,
throwing them and catching them back; as though from an oily
smoother air, they come down on the threadbare
carpet, thinned by their everlasting
upspringing, this carpet forlornly
lost in the cosmos.
Laid on there like a plaster, as though the suburban
sky had injured the earth.
And hardly there,
upright, shown there: the great initial
letter of Thereness,—then even the strongest
men are rolled once more, in sport, by the ever-
returning grasp, as once by Augustus the Strong
a tin platter at table.
Alas, and around this
centre the rose of onlooking
blooms and unblossoms. Round this
pestle, this pistil, caught by its own
dust-pollen, and fertilised over again
to sham-fruit of boredom, their own
never-realised boredom, gleaming with thinnest
lightly sham-smiling surface.
There, the withered wrinkled lifter,
old now and only drumming,
shrivelled up in his mighty skin as though it had once contained
two men, and one were already
lying in the churchyard, and he had outlasted the other,
deaf and sometimes a little
strange in his widowed skin.
And the youngster, the man, like the son of a neck
and a nun: so tautly and smartly filled
with muscle and simpleness.
O you,
a pain that was still quite small
received as a plaything once in one of its
long convalescences …
You, that fall with the thud
only fruits know, unripe,
daily a hundred times from the tree
of mutually built up motion (the tree that, swifter than water,
has spring and summer and autumn in so many minutes),
fall and rebound on the grave:
sometimes, in half-pauses, a tenderness tries
to steal out over your face to your seldomly
tender mother, but scatters over your body,
whose surface quickly absorbs the timidly rippling,
hardly attempted look … And again
that man is clapping his hands for the downward spring, and before
a single pain has got within range of your ever-
galloping heart, comes the tingling
in the soles of your feet, ahead of the spring that it springs from,
chasing into your eyes a few physical tears.
And, spite of all, blindly,
your smile …
Angel! Oh, take it, pluck it, that small-flowered herb of healing!
Shape a vase to preserve it. Set it among those joys
not yet opened to us; in a graceful urn
praise it, with florally-soaring inscription:
“Subrisio Saltat”.
Then you, my darling,
mutely elided
by all the most exquisite joys. Perhaps
your frills are happy on your behalf,—
or over your tight young breasts
the green metallic silk
feels itself endlessly spoilt and in need of nothing.
You, time after time, upon all of the quivering scale-pans of balance
freshly laid fruit of serenity,
publicly shown among shoulders.
Where, oh where in the world is that place in my heart
where they still were far from being able, still fell away
from each other like mounting animals, not yet
properly paired;—
where weights are still heavy,
and hoops still stagger
away from their vainly
twirling sticks? …
And then, in this wearisome nowhere, all of a sudden,
the ineffable spot where the pure too-little
incomprehensibility changes,—springs round
into that empty too-much?
Where the many-digited sum
solves into zero?
Squares, o square in Paris, infinite show-place,
where the modiste Madame Lamort
winds and binds the restless ways of the world,
those endless ribbons, to ever-new
creations of bow, frill, flower, cockade and fruit,
all falsely-coloured, to deck
the cheep winter-hats of Fate.
…
Angel: suppose there is a place we know nothing about, and there,
on some indescribable carpet, lovers show all that here
they’re for ever unable to manage—their daring
lofty figures of heart-flight,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders,
long since, where ground never was, just quiveringly
propped by each other,—suppose they could manage it there,
before the spectators ringed round, the countless unmurmuring dead:
would not the dead then fling their last, their for ever reserved,
ever-concealed, unknown to us, ever-valid
coins of happiness down before the at last
truthfully smiling pair on the quietened carpet?