Every Angel is terrible. Still, though, alas!
I invoke you, almost deadly birdst of the soul,
knowing what you are. Oh, where are the days of Tobias,
when one of the shining-most stood on the simple threshold,
a little disguised for the journey, no longer appalling,
(a youth to the youth as he curiously peered outside).
Let the archangel perilous now, from behind the stars,
step but a step down hitherwards: high up-beating,
our heart would out-beat us. Who are you?
Early successes, Creation’s pampered darlings,
ranges, summits, dawn-red ridges
of all beginning,—pollen of blossoming godhead,
hinges of light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
spaces of being, shields of felicity, tumults
of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate,
mirrors, drawing up their own
outstreamed beauty into their faces again.
For we, when we feel, evaporate; oh, we
breathe ourselves out and away; from ember to ember
yielding a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:
‘You’ve got in my blood, the room, the Spring’s
growing full of you’ … What is the use? He cannot retain us.
We vanish within and around him. And those that have beauty,
oh, who shall hold them back? Incessant appearance
comes and goes in their faces. Like dew from the morning grass
exhales from us that which is ours, like heat
from a smoking dish. O smile, whither? O upturned glance:
new, warm, vanishing wave of the heart—alas,
but we are all that. Does the cosmic space
we dissolve into taste of us, then? Do the angels really
only catch up what is theirs, what has streamed from them, or at times,
as though through an oversight, is a little of our
existence in them as well? Is there just so much of us
mixed with their features as that vague look in the faces
of pregnant women? Unmarked by them in their whirling
return to themselves. (How should they remark it?)
Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter
strange things in the midnight air. For it seems that everything is
trying to hide us. Look, the trees exist; the houses
we live in still stand where they were. We only
pass everything by like a transposition of air.
And all combines to suppress us, partly as shame,
perhaps, and partly as inexpressible hope.
Lovers, to you, each satisfied in the other,
I turn with my question about us. You grasp yourselves. Have you proofs?
Look, with me it may happen at times that my hands
grow aware of each other, or else that my hard-worn face
seeks refuge within them. That gives me a little
sensation. But who, just for that, could presume to exist?
You, though, that go on growing
in the other’s rapture till, overwhelmed, he implores
‘No more’; you that under each other’s hands
grow more abundant like vintage grapes;
sinking at times, but only because the other
has to completely emerged; I ask you about us. I know
why you so blissfully touch: because he caress persists,
because it does not vanish, the place that you
so tenderly cover; because you perceive thereunder
pure duration. Until your embraces almost
promise eternity. Yet, when you’ve once withstood
the startled first encounter, the window-longing,
and that first walk, just once, through the garden together:
Lovers, are you the same? When you lift yourselves
up to each other’s lips—dring unto drink:
oh, how strangely the drinker eludes his part!
On Attic stelês, did not the circumspection
of human gesture amazing? Were no love and farewell
so lightly laid upon shoulders, they seemed to be made
of other stuff than with us? Remember the hands,
how they rest without pressure, though power is there in the torsos.
The wisdom of those self-masters was this: we have got so far;
ours is to touch one another like this; the gods
may press more strongly upon us. But that is the gods’ affair.
If only we could discover some pure, contained,
narrow, human, own little strip of orchard
in between river and rock! For our heart transcends us
just as it did those others. And we can no longer
gaze after it into figures that soothe it, or godlike
bodies, wherein it achieves a grander restraint.