O trees of life, when will your winter come?
We are never single-minded, unperplexed,
like migratory birds. Outstript and late,
we suddenly thrust into the wind, and fall
into unfeeling ponds. We comprehend
flowering and fading simultaneously.
And somewhere lions still roam, all unaware,
in being magnificent, of any weakness.
We, though, while we are intent upon one thing,
can feel the cost and conquest of another.
Hostility is our first response. Aren’t lovers
for ever reaching verges in each other,—
lovers, that looked for spaces, hunting, home?
Then, for the sudden sketchwork of a moment,
a ground of contrast’s painfully prepared,
to make us see it. For they’re very clear
with us, we that don’t know our feeling’s shape,
but only that which forms it from outside.
Who is not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain?
Up it would go: the scenery was parting.
Easy to understand. The well-known garden,
swaying a little. Then appeared the dancer
Not the! Enough! However light he foots it,
he is just disguised, and turns into a bourgeois,
and passes through the kitchen to his dwelling.
I will not have those half-filled masks! No, no,
rather the doll. That is full. I’ll force myself
to bear the husk, the wire, and even the face
that is all outside. Here! I’m already waiting.
Even if the lights go out, even if I’m told
‘There is nothing more,’—even if greyish draughts
of emptiness come drifting from the stage,—
even if of all my silent forebears none
sits by me any longer, not a woman,
not even the boy with the brown squinting eyes:
I’ll still remain. For one can always watch.
Am I not right? You, to whom life would taste
so bitter, Father, when you tasted mine,
that turbid first infusion of my Must,
you kept on tasting as I kept on growing,
and, fascinated by the after-taste
of such queer future, tried my clouded gaze,—
you, who so often since you died, my Father,
have been afraid within my inmost hope,
surrendering realms of that serenity
the dead are lords of for my bit of fate,—
am I not right? And you, am I not right,—
you that would love me for that small beginning
of love for you I always turned away from,
because the space within your faces changed,
even while I loved it, into cosmic space
where you no longer were … , when I feel like it,
to wait before the puppet stage,—no, rather
gaze so intensely on it that at last,
to upweigh my gaze, an angel has to come
and play a part there, snatching up the husks?
Angel and doll! Then there is at last a play.
Then there unites what we continually
part by our being there. Then at last
can spring from our own turning years the cycle
of the whole going-on. Over and above us
there is then the angel playing. Look, the dying,—
surely they must suspect how full of pretext
is all that we accomplish here, where nothing
is what it really is. O hours of childhood,
hours when behind the figures there was more
than the mere past, and when what lay before us
was not the future! We were growing, and sometimes
impatient to grow up, half for the sake
of those who’d nothing left but their grown-upness.
Yet, when alone, we entertained ourselves
with everlastingness: there we would stand,
within the gap left between world and toy,
upon a spot which, from the first beginning,
had been established for a pure event.
Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who’ll place it
within its constellation, with the measure
of distance in its hand? Who’ll make its death
from grey bread, that grows hard,—or leave it there,
within the round mouth, like the choking core
of a sweet apple? … Minds of murderers
are easily divined. But this, though: death,
the whole of death,—even before life has begun,
to hold it all so gently, and be good:
this is beyond description!