Whoever you are: at evening step out
from your room, where you know everything;
last thing before the distance lies your house:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which, weary, barely
free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift, quite slowly, a single black tree
and set it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is great
and like a word still ripening in silence.
And as your will grasps hold of its meaning,
your eyes let it go, tenderly....

The forest is fragrant again.
The hovering larks lift
the sky up with them, that lay heavy on our shoulders;
true, through the branches one still saw how empty the day was,–
but after long, rainy afternoons
come the gold-oversunned
newer hours,
fleeing before which, on far house-fronts,
all the wounded
windows beat fearfully with wings.

Then it grows still. Even the rain goes more softly
over the stones’ quietly darkening gleam.
All the sounds duck right down
into the glistening buds of the twigs.

South-German night, spread wide in the ripe moon
and mild as the return of all the fairy tales.
From the tower many hours fall heavily
down into their depths as into the sea,–
and then a rushing and a call of the watch,
and for a while the silence stays empty;
and then a violin (God knows from where)
wakes and says, quite slowly:
A blonde...

The knight rides out in black steel
into the rushing world.
And outside is everything: the day and the valley
and the friend and the foe and the feast in the hall
and the May and the maid and the wood and the Grail,
and God himself is set, many thousand times,
along every road.

But inside, within the knight’s armor,
behind the darkest rings,
Death crouches and must brood and brood:
When will the blade leap
over the iron hedge,
the strange, freeing blade
that fetches me out of my hiding-place
where I spend so many
stooped-over days,–
so that at last I stretch
and play
and sing.

A young knight comes to my mind
almost like an old proverb.

He came. So sometimes in the grove
the great storm comes and wraps you in.
He went. So the benediction
of the great bells leaves you alone
often in the middle of the prayer....
Then you want to scream into the stillness
and yet you weep, quite softly, only
deep into your cool cloth.

A young knight comes to my mind,
who goes far off in arms.

His smile was so soft and fine:
like sheen on old ivory,
like homesickness, like a Christmas snowfall
in the dark village, like turquoise
ringed about with nothing but pearls,
like moonlight
on a beloved book.

Others must go by long roads
to the dark poets;
always asking someone or other
whether he has not seen one singing
or laying hands on the strings.
Only the girls do not ask
which bridge leads to the images;
they only smile, brighter than strings of pearls
held against bowls of silver.

Out of their life every door opens
into a poet
and into the world.

Girls, poets are those who learn from you
to say that which you are in your aloneness;
and they learn to live by you, you distant ones,
as the evenings, by the great stars,
grow used to eternity.

None of you may ever give herself to the poet,
even if his eye entreated for women:
for he can think of you only as girls;
the feeling in your wrists
would break beneath brocade.

Let him be alone in his garden,
where he received you as eternal ones
on the paths he walked each day,
by the benches that wait in shadow,
and in the room where the lute hung.

Go!... It is darkening. His senses no longer
seek your voice and form.
And he loves the roads long and empty
and nothing white beneath the dark beeches,–
and the silent room he loves dearly.
... Your voices he hears going far off
(among people he wearily avoids)
and: his tender remembering suffers
in the feeling that many see you.

Who is it, who loves me so much that he
would cast off his own dear life?
If someone drowns in the sea for my sake,
then I am redeemed from the stone, brought back
into life, into life set free.

I long so for the rushing blood;
the stone is so still.
I dream of life: life is good.
Has no one the courage
through whom I want to wake?

And if I am once in life,
which gives me all that is most golden,–

then I will, alone,
weep, weep for my stone.
What use is my blood, if it ripens like wine?
It cannot scream out of the sea the one
who loved me most.

She must always be musing: I am... I am....
Who are you then, Marie?
A queen, a queen!
Down on your knees before me, on your knees!

She must always be weeping: I was... I was....
Who were you then, Marie?
A nobody’s child, quite poor and bare,
and I cannot tell you how.

And out of such a child you became
a princess, before whom people kneel?
Because all things are other
than one sees them while begging.

So the things have made you great,
and can you still say when?
One night, one night, over a single night,–
and they spoke to me differently.
I stepped out into the lane and look:
it is as if strung with strings;
there Marie became melody, melody...
and danced from edge to edge.
The people crept so fearfully along,
as if planted hard against the houses,–
for surely only a queen may do this:
that she dances in the lanes: dances!...

Yes, I long for you. I slide,
losing myself, out of my own hand,
without hope that I might contest
what comes to me as from your side,
grave and unswerving and unturned-away.

... those times: O how I was a single thing,
nothing that called and nothing that betrayed me,
my stillness was like a stone’s,
over which the brook draws its murmuring.

But now, in these spring weeks,
something has slowly broken me away
from the unconscious, dark year.
Something has given my poor warm life
into the hand of someone
who does not know what I was only yesterday.

Call me, beloved, call me loud!
Don’t let your bride stand so long at the window.
In the old avenues of plane trees
the evening keeps watch no longer:
they are empty.

And if you do not come to seal me
into the nocturnal house with your voice,
then I must pour myself out
of my own hands
into the gardens of the dark-blue....

Do you hear, beloved, I lift my hands–
do you hear: there is a rushing....
What gesture of the solitary would not find
itself overheard by many things?
Do you hear, beloved, I close my lids,
and even that is a sound that reaches you,
do you hear, beloved, I raise them again....
... But why are you not here.

The imprint of my slightest movement
stays visible in the silken silence;
indestructibly, the least stirring presses
itself into the taut curtain of the distance.
On my breaths the stars
rise and sink.
To my lips the fragrances come to drink,
and I make out the wrists
of distant Angels.
Only the one I think of: you
I do not see.

What are you playing, boy? Through the gardens it went
like many footsteps, whispering commands.
What are you playing, boy? Look, your soul
got caught in the bars of the syrinx.

Why do you lure it? The sound is like a prison
in which it dawdles and pines away;
strong is your life, yet your song is stronger,
leaning, sobbing, against your longing.–

Give it a silence, that the soul may softly
return home into the flooding and the many,
in which it lived, growing, wide and wise,
before you forced it into your delicate games.

How more wearily it already beats its wings:
so you, dreamer, will squander its flight,
so that its pinion, sawn through by song,
no longer carries it over my walls
when I come to call it to the joys.

They all have weary mouths
and bright souls without seam.
And a longing (as if for sin)
sometimes passes through their dreams.

Almost they all resemble one another;
in God’s gardens they keep silent,
like many, many intervals
in his power and melody.

Only when they spread their wings
are they the wakers of a wind:
as if God with his wide
sculptor’s hands were turning the pages
in the dark book of the beginning.

You are the bird whose wings came
when I woke in the night and called.
Only with my arms I called, for your name
is like an abyss, a thousand nights deep.
You are the shadow in which I quietly fell asleep,
and every dream your seed conceives in me,–
you are the image, but I am the frame
that completes you in shining relief.

What shall I call you? See, my lips are lamed.
You are the beginning, pouring greatly forth,
I am the slow and anxious Amen
that shyly closes your beauty.

Often you have torn me out of dark repose,
when sleep appeared to me like a grave
and like a going-lost and a fleeing,–
then you raised me up out of the heart’s darknesses
and wanted to hoist me on all the towers
like scarlet banners and like draperies.

You: who speak of wonders as of knowledge
and of human beings as of melodies
and of the roses: of events
that, flaming, fulfill themselves within your gaze,–
you blessed one, when will you once name Him
from whose seventh and last day
a radiance still lies lost
upon the beating of your wings.
Do you command me to ask?

A martyr she is. And when, in its hard fall,
with a single jerk
the axe went through her short youth,
the fine red ring laid itself
about her throat and was the first adornment
that she took with a stranger’s smile:
but even that she bears only with shame.
And when she sleeps, her young sister must
(who, childish still, adorns herself with the wound
of that stone which crushed her brow,)
hold her hard arms about her neck,
and often in dream the other one pleads: Tighter, tighter.
And then it sometimes occurs to the child
to hide her brow, with the mark of that stone,
in the folds of the soft nightgown,
which lifts up bright with the sister’s breathing,
full as a sail that lives upon the wind.

That is the hour in which they are holy,
the silent virgin and the pale child.

Then they are again as before all suffering
and sleep poor and have no glory,
and their souls are like white silk,
and with the same longing both of them tremble
and are afraid before their own heroism.

And you may think: if they rose up from their beds
at the next morning light
and, with the same dreaming face,
came down the lanes in the little towns,–
no one would stay behind to marvel after them,
no window would rattle along the rows of houses,
and nowhere among the women would a murmur go,
and none of the children would cry out.
They would stride through the stillness in their shifts
(the flat folds give off no radiance)
so strange and yet to no one strange,
as though to a festival, but without a wreath.

The people were thirsty; and so the one
thirstless girl went, went to implore
the stones for water for a whole people.
Yet without a sign the willow branch stayed,
and she grew weary with the long walking
and thought, at last, only that someone suffered,
(a sick boy, and the two of them
had once, one evening, looked at each other with foreboding).
Then the young willow-rod bent down
in her hands, thirsting like an animal:
now it went blossoming over her blood,
and rushing, her blood went deep beneath her.

There the school’s long fear and time run by
with waiting, with nothing but dull things.
O solitude, o heavy passing of the time....
And then out: the streets sparkle and ring,
and on the squares the fountains leap,
and in the gardens the world grows so wide.–
And to go through it all in one’s little coat,
quite otherwise than the others go and went–:
O wondrous time, o passing of the time,
o solitude.

And to look far out into all of it:
men and women; men, men, women
and children, who are different and bright;
and there a house and now and then a dog
and terror soundlessly changing place with trust–:
O grief without meaning, o dream, o dread,
o depth without a ground.

And so to play: ball and quoit and hoop
in a garden that softly pales,
and now and then to brush against the grown-ups,
blind and wild in the haste of the chase,
but at evening still, with small stiff
steps to go home, held tightly by the hand–:
O ever more escaping comprehension,
o fear, o burden.

And for hours at the great gray pond
to kneel with a little sailing-ship;
to forget it, because other sails, the same
and lovelier, draw through the rings,
and to have to think about the little pale
face that, sinking, shone out of the pond–:
O childhood, o likenesses gliding away.
Where to? Where to?

The darkening was like riches in the room
in which the boy, well hidden, sat.
And when the mother entered as in a dream,
a glass trembled in the silent cupboard.
She felt how the room betrayed her,
and kissed her boy: Are you here?...
Then both looked anxiously toward the piano,
for many an evening she would have a song
in which the child got strangely, deeply caught.

He sat very still. His great gazing hung
upon her hand, which, all bent down by the ring,
as though it walked heavily through snowdrifts,
moved over the white keys.

I should like to become one of those
who drive through the night with wild horses,
with torches that, like loosened hair,
stream in the great wind of their hunting.
In front I should like to stand as in a boat,
tall, and unfurled like a banner.
Dark, but with a helmet of gold
that glints uneasily. And ranged behind me
ten men out of the same darkness,
with helmets that, like mine, are unsteady,
now clear as glass, now dark, old and blind.
And one stands by me and blows us room
with the trumpet, which flashes and screams,
and blows us a black solitude
through which we race like a swift dream:
the houses fall to their knees behind us,
the lanes bend crookedly to meet us,
the squares give way: we seize them,
and our steeds rush like a rain.

In white veils the confirmands go
deep into the new green of the gardens.
They have come through their childhood,
and what comes now will be different.

O does it come, then! Does the pause not begin now,
the waiting for the next stroke of the hour?
The feast is over, and the house grows loud,
and more sadly the afternoon goes by....

That was a rising to the white dress
and then a decked-out walking through the lanes
and a church, inside cool as silk,
and long candles were like avenues,
and all the lights shone like jewelry,
looked upon by solemn eyes.

And it was still when the singing began:
like clouds it rose into the vaulting
and grew bright in its falling; and milder
than rain it fell upon the white children.
And as if in wind their white stirred,
and grew softly colored in its folds
and seemed to hold hidden flowers–:
flowers and birds, stars and figures
out of an old, far cycle of legend.

And outside was a day of blue and green
with a cry of red in bright places.
The pond withdrew in little waves,
and with the wind came a far blossoming
and sang of gardens outside the town.

It was as if the things were wreathing themselves,
they stood luminous, infinitely lightly sunned;
a feeling was in every house-front,
and many windows opened and shone.

They are gathered, astonished and dismayed,
around him who, like a sage, comes to his close,
and who takes himself away from those he belonged to,
and who flows past them, a stranger.
The old solitude comes over him
that raised him to his deep act;
now he will wander again through the olive grove,
and those who love him will flee before him.

He has summoned them to the last table
and (as a shot scares the birds out of the bean-pods)
he scares their hands out of the loaves
with his word: they fly toward him;
they flutter anxiously around the table-round
and seek a way out. But he
is everywhere, like an hour of dusk.

Out of unending longings rise
finite deeds like weak fountains
that bow early and trembling.
But those that otherwise keep silent from us,
our joyful powers–show
themselves in these dancing tears.

I should like to sing someone to rest,
to sit by someone and to be.
I should like to cradle you and sing you small
and to go with you out of sleep and in.
I should like to be the only one in the house
who knew: the night was cold.
And should like to listen out and in,
into you, into the world, into the wood.–
The clocks call to one another, striking,
and one sees time to its very ground.
And below a strange man still goes by
and disturbs a strange dog.
Behind that comes stillness. I have laid
my eyes upon you, wide;
they hold you gently and let you go
when a thing stirs in the dark.

The nights are not made for the crowd.
The night divides you from your neighbor,
and still you should not seek him out.
And if at night you light your room
to look people in the face,
you must consider: whom.

People are fearfully disfigured by the light
that drips from their faces,
and if at night they have gathered together,
you look upon a tottering world
heaped in confusion.
On their brows a yellow gleam
has crowded out all thought,
in their glances the wine flickers,
on their hands hangs
the heavy gesture with which they
make themselves understood in their talk;
and meanwhile they say: I and I
and mean: anyone at all.

Strange violin, are you following me?
In how many far cities already
has your lonely night spoken to mine?
Do hundreds play you? Does a single one?

Are there in all the great cities
such as, without you,
would already have lost themselves in the rivers?
And why does it always fall to me?

Why am I always the neighbor of those
who anxiously force you to sing
and to say: Life is heavier
than the heaviness of all things?

The blind man who stands upon the bridge,
gray as a boundary-stone of nameless realms,
he is perhaps the thing, the ever-constant,
around which from afar the star-hour turns
and the bright midpoint of the constellations.
For all around him strays and runs and struts.

He is the unmoving just one,
set down amid many tangled ways;
the dark entrance to the underworld
among a superficial race.

Like one who sailed on foreign seas,
so am I among the eternally native;
the full days stand upon their tables,
but to me the distance is full of figure.

A world reaches into my face,
one perhaps as unpeopled as a moon,
but they let no feeling stand alone,
and all their words are inhabited.

The things that I brought with me from far away
look strange, held up against their own–:
in their great homeland they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

(Jardin d’Acclimatation)

No vision of foreign lands,
no feeling of brown women who
dance out of the falling garments.

No wild, foreign melody.
No songs that sprang from the blood,
and no blood that cried out of the depths.

No brown girls who spread themselves
like velvet in tropical weariness;
no eyes that flamed like weapons,

and the mouths broad for laughter.
And a strange mutual understanding
with the vanity of the pale-skinned people.

And I was so afraid to look on.

O how much more faithful are the animals
that pace up and down in cages,
out of all accord with the doings of new
foreign things they do not understand;
and they burn, like a quiet fire,
softly out and sink into themselves,
indifferent to the new adventure
and alone with their great blood.

I have no father’s house
and have not lost one either;
my mother bore me out
into the world.
So here I stand now in the world and go
ever deeper into the world
and have my happiness and have my woe
and have each one alone.
And yet I am the heir of many a thing.
With three branches my line once flowered
on seven castles in the wood
and grew weary of its coat of arms
and was already far too old;–
and what they left me and what I add
to the old possession is homeless.
In my hands, in my lap
I must hold it until I die.
For what I set down,
out into the world,
falls,
is set as though
upon a wave.

In the withered wood there is a bird-call
that seems senseless in this withered wood.
And yet the round bird-call rests
in this while that made it,
broad as a sky upon the withered wood.
Pliantly everything makes room within the cry.
The whole land seems to lie soundless in it,
the great wind seems to nestle inside it,
and the minute that wants to go on
is pale and still, as if it knew of things
of which everyone must die,
risen up out of that cry.

O how far away everything is
and long since gone.
I believe that the star
from which I receive a shining
has been dead for thousands of years.
I believe, in the boat
that passed by,
I heard something fearful said.
In the house a clock
struck....
In which house?...
I should like to step out of my heart
and walk beneath the great sky.
I should like to pray.
And one of all the stars
must really still exist.
I believe I would know
which one alone
has endured,
which, like a white city,
stands at the ray’s end in the heavens....

Solitude is like a rain.
It rises from the sea to meet the evenings;
from plains that are far off and remote
it goes up to the sky, which always has it.
And only from the sky does it fall upon the city.

It rains down in the hermaphrodite hours,
when all the lanes turn toward morning,
and when the bodies that have found nothing
let go of one another, disappointed and sad;
and when the people who hate each other
must sleep together in one bed:

then solitude goes with the rivers....

Lord: it is time. The summer was very great.
Lay your shadow upon the sundials,
and upon the meadows let the winds loose.

Command the last fruits to be full;
give them two more southerly days,
urge them on to completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will build none anymore.
Whoever is alone now will long remain so,
will wake, read, write long letters,
and will wander restlessly in the avenues,
back and forth, when the leaves are drifting.

And you wait, await the one thing
that endlessly augments your life;
the mighty, the uncommon,
the awakening of the stones,
depths turned toward you.

In the bookcase the volumes
darken in gold and brown;
and you think of lands you journeyed through,
of images, of the garments
of women lost again.

And then you know all at once: that was it.
You rise, and before you stands
a bygone year’s
fear and shape and prayer.

For some time now I have seen
how everything transforms.
Something rises up and acts
and kills and causes pain.

From time to time all
the gardens are not the same;
from the yellowing to the yellow
slow decay:
how long the way was for me.

Now I am among the empty ones
and look down all the avenues.
Almost to the far seas
I can see the grave, heavy,
forbidding sky.

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far away,
as though far gardens withered in the skies;
they fall with a gesture of denial.

And in the nights the heavy earth falls
out of all the stars into solitude.

We are all falling. This hand here falls.
And look at the others: it is in them all.

And yet there is One who holds this falling
infinitely gently in his hands.

My room and this expanse,
awake over the nightfalling land, -
are one. I am a string
stretched over wide
rushing resonances.

The things are violin-bodies,
full of a murmuring dark;
in them dreams the weeping of women,
in them stirs, in its sleep, the rancor
of whole generations....
I am to
tremble silverly: then will
everything beneath me quake,
and what goes astray within the things
will strive toward the light
that, from my dancing tone,
around which the sky undulates,
through narrow, languishing fissures
falls into the old
abysses without
end....

Night, still night, into which are woven
quite white things, red things, many-colored things,
scattered colors that are raised
into a single Dark, a single Stillness,–bring
me too into relation with the Many
that you gather and persuade. Do then
my senses still play too much with light?
Would my face
still stand out, disturbing, from the objects?
Judge me by my hands:
do they not lie there like tool and thing?
Is not the ring itself plain
upon my hand, and does the light not lie
just so, full of trust, upon them,–
as though they were roads that, lit,
branch no differently than in the dark?...

And again my deep life rushes louder,
as though it now ran between wider banks.
Ever more akin to me the things become,
and all the images ever more beheld.
With the nameless I feel myself more intimate:
with my senses, as with birds, I reach
out of the oak into the windy skies,
and into the broken-off day of the ponds
my feeling sinks, as though standing upon fishes.

I am like a flag surrounded by distances.
I sense the winds that come, and must live them,
while the things below do not yet stir:
the doors still close softly, and in the chimneys there is silence;
the windows do not yet tremble, and the dust is still heavy.

Already I know the storms, and am stirred like the sea.
And I spread myself out and fall into myself
and throw myself off and am all alone
in the great storm.

When the clouds, struck by storms,
go racing:
skies of a hundred days
over a single day–:

then I feel you, Hetman, from afar
(you who gladly would have led
your Cossacks to the greatest Lord).
Your horizontal neck
I feel, Mazeppa.

Then I too am bound to the raging race
of a smoking back;
all things have vanished from me,
only the skies can I make out:

over-darkened and over-shone
I lie flat beneath them,
as plains lie;
my eyes are open like ponds,
and in them flees the same
flying.

The park is high. And as if from a house
I step out of its dusk
into plain and evening. Into the wind,
the same wind that the clouds also feel,
the bright rivers and the wing-mills
that stand slowly grinding at the sky’s edge.
Now I too am a thing in his hand,
the smallest among these–look:

Is that a sky?:
blessed luminous blue
into which ever purer clouds are pressing,
and below it all the whites in transitions,
and above it that thin great gray,
warmly surging as over a red underpainting,
and over all this the quiet radiance
of the sinking sun.

Wondrous structure,
moved within itself and held up by itself,
forming figures, giant wings, folds
and high ranges before the first stars,
and suddenly, there: a gate into such distances
as perhaps only birds know....

The evening slowly changes its garments,
held for it by a rim of old trees;
you look: and the lands part from you,
one going heavenward and one that falls;

and they leave you, belonging wholly to neither,
not quite so dark as the house that keeps silent,
not quite so surely conjuring the eternal
as that which becomes a star each night and rises;

and they leave you (unspeakable to disentangle)
your life, afraid and gigantic and ripening,
so that, now bounded and now comprehending,
it becomes by turns a stone in you and a star.

Whoever weeps now somewhere in the world,
without reason weeps in the world,
weeps over me.

Whoever laughs now somewhere in the night,
without reason laughs in the night,
laughs at me.

Whoever walks now somewhere in the world,
without reason walks in the world,
walks toward me.

Whoever dies now somewhere in the world,
without reason dies in the world,
looks at me.

There is one who takes all into his hand,
so that they run like sand through his fingers.
He chooses the loveliest of the queens
and has them hewn for himself in white marble,
lying still in the melody of the mantle;
and lays the kings beside their women,
shaped from the same stone as they.

There is one who takes all into his hand,
so that they are like bad blades and break.
He is no stranger, for he dwells in the blood
that is our life and rushes and rests.
I cannot believe that he does wrong;
yet I hear many speak evil of him.

The God took fright in his solitude.
He saw, deep below in the gray time,
the autumn day going. It was so aged
that the faint arrow from the bow of its strength
no longer carried to the evening’s rim.
Often it stood still and stared toward the hills,
and at last it sank, weary, into the poor grass;
and as the greedy vulture upon the carrion,
so there fell upon it, with heavy black wings,
the wet night that devoured its soul.

The black night sat upon the dead day,
and God took fright:
his gaze went long astray in the dark;
and when he stepped out of clouds and tangle,
he found the distance not, neither flood nor field:
the black night was devouring the whole world.

Then God surmised, looking shuddering down,
how beneath this heavy beat of wings
the wide world stiffened and was smothered
just like a day.
And suddenly he knew: he loved her.
Yet motionless and shadowing the night-plumage stayed,
as down from the rim of the empty heavens
his will cried out....

But the God grows greater in his wrath;
when once he cries his lonely grief
into the wakening expanses,
the storm is his voice.
And then his blowing word tears
the clouds away from the moons:
and so he saw, enthroned in the shimmer,
nothing but like eternities,
saw the stars dwelling in the stillness
and the worlds striding in their change.

And his dread found all things sheltered
in the softly caressing light,–
but over the yesterday and tomorrow
the night kept silent, and did not stir.

And then the God was like a child,
and he went blind with weeping,
and through the whimpering wind
he reached with helpless hands:
whether in the ether they might find the shores
that are the tips of the towers.
His weeping was orphaned and cried:
"Is the world then so deep, so deep,
that the God who devised summers and suns,
who plunged into every thought,
cannot even reach the smoke
that smoked about their summits–their breath?
Is there no garden there that wafts with blossoms,
no listening sorrow, no waking prayer,
no stillness that understands me?"

On earth there was only a tiny light
that, close in the velvet dark,
kept watch by the child’s cradle
and thought upon its meager existence
when the voice of the storm rang out.
Then the spark grew so homesick-anxious
that, softly, out of its gleaming cup,
it sprang like the spring from the rock
and, along the folds of the curtain,
reached wishing toward all the walls,
until, bursting, the beams bent,–
and on high, blazing waves
the cradle drove, the slumbering ship.

Then the world stirs. From the slopes
the night lifts shyly before the conquering light.
The God smiles; he knows only the one thing:
She lives!

Give your beauty always away
without reckoning or speaking.
You keep silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in a thousandfold sense,
comes at last over everyone.

You are not nearer to God than we;
we are all far from him.
But wonderfully are your
hands made blessed.
So they ripen in no other woman,
so shimmering from the hem:
I am the day, I am the dew,
but you are the tree.

I am weary now, my way was far,
forgive me, I forgot
what he, who sat great in golden jewelry
as though in the sun,
charged me to proclaim to you, you musing one,
(the space has bewildered me).
See: I am the beginning,
but you are the tree.

I spread my pinions out
and grew strangely wide;
now your little house overflows
with my great robe.
And yet you are so alone
as never before, and hardly look at me;
that is because: I am a breath in the grove,
but you are the tree.

All the Angels are afraid like this,
they let go of one another:
never was longing so,
so uncertain and so great.
Perhaps that something soon will happen
which you grasp in a dream.
Be greeted; my soul sees:
you are ready and you ripen.
You are a great and lofty gate,
and soon you will open.
You, the dearest ear of my song,
now I feel: my word lost
itself in you as in a wood.

So I came and completed
a thousand-and-one dreams for you.
God looked at me: he dazzled....

But you are the tree.

LEGEND

Once, when at the desert’s hem
the hand of the Lord opened
like a fruit that, summerly,
proclaims its kernel,
there was a wonder: far apart
three kings and a star
knew and greeted one another.

Three kings from On-the-Way
and the star from Everywhere,
they all journeyed (just think of it!)
so, a Rex on the right and a Rex on the left,
to a quiet stall.

What did they not all bring with them
to the stall of Bethlehem!
Each step rang out far and wide,
and the one who rode upon a black horse
sat in velvet and at ease;
and the one who went at his right hand
was a golden man;
and the one at his left began,
with swing and swinging
and clang and clinging,
out of a round silver thing
that swayed and hung in rings,
to smoke all blue.

Then the star from Everywhere laughed
so strangely over them
and ran ahead and stood at the stall
and said to Mary:

Here I bring a wandering company
from many a far land.
Three kings with magus-power,
heavy with gold and topaz
and dark, dull, and heroic,–
do not take too great a fright.
All three of them have at home
twelve daughters, not one son,
and so they beg yours of you
as the sun of their sky-blue
and comfort for their throne.
Yet you must not at once believe: that merely
some sparkle-prince and heathen sheikh
should be your son’s lot.
Consider, the way is long.
They wander long, like shepherds,
and meanwhile their ripe realm falls
God knows into whose lap.
And while here, warm as a west wind,
the ox snorts about their ear,
they are perhaps already all poor
and as though without a head.
So with your smile make bright
the tangle that they are,
and turn your face
toward the sunrise, and your child;
there, in blue lines, lies
what each has left to you:
Emeraldia and Rubinia
and the vales of turquoise.

Each one of the white brotherhood
entrusts himself, planting, to his little garden.
On every bed it is written who each one is.
And one waits, in secret arrogance,
that in May
the unruly blossoms might reveal to him
an image of his suppressed strength.

And his hands hold, as if slackened,
his brown head, heavy with the saps
that roll impatiently through the dark,
and his robe, which, pleated, full and woolen,
flows to his feet, is drawn taut
about his arms, which, like strong shafts,
bear the hands that are meant to dream.

No Miserere and no Kyrie
will his young round voice intone,
before no curse will it flee;
it is no deer.
It is a steed and rears against the bit,
and over hurdle, slope, and hindrance
it would carry him far and sure of the way,
quite without saddle it would carry him.

But he sits, and beneath his thoughts
the broad wrists almost break,
so heavy grows his mind, and ever heavier.

The evening comes, the gentle returner,
a wind begins, the paths grow emptier,
and shadows gather in the valley’s hollow.
And like a boat that sways upon its chain,
so the garden grows uncertain and hangs
as if wind-cradled upon sheer dusk.
Who will set it loose?...

The frate is so young,
and long, long has his mother been dead.
He knows of her: they called her La Stanca;
she was a glass, quite delicate and clear. It was offered
to one who, after the draught, smashed it
like a jug.

Such is the father.
And he earns his bread
as a master in the red marble quarries.
And every woman in childbed in Pietrabianca
fears that at night, with his curses,
he passes by her window and threatens.

His son, whom he consecrated to the Donna Dolorosa
in an hour of wild distress,
muses in the arcaded court of the Certosa,
muses, as if rustled around by reddish scents:
for his flowers all bloom red.

They will all, as if out of a bath,
rise from their crumbling tombs;
for all believe in the seeing-again,
and terrible is their faith, without grace.

Speak softly, God! Someone might think
that the trumpet of your kingdoms called;
and for its sound no deep is deep enough:
then all the ages climb out of the stones,
and all the vanished ones appear
in withered linen, in brittle bones
and bent with the weight of their clods of earth.
That will be a strange returning
into a strange homeland;
even those who never knew you will cry out
and crave your greatness as a right:
like bread and wine.

All-Beholding, you know the wild image
that, trembling, I compose in my darkness.
Through you comes everything, for you are the gate,–
and all was in your countenance
before it lost itself in ours.
You know the image of the giant judgment:
a morning it is, but out of a light
that your ripe love never made,
a rushing it is, not from your call,
a trembling, not of divine renunciation,
a swaying, not in your equilibrium.
A rustling it is and a snatching-together
in all the burst-open buildings,
a settling-of-accounts and a squandering,
a mating and a gawking,
and a fingering of all the old joys
and the withered return of all the lusts.
And over churches that gape like wounds
black birds, which you never created,
move in deranged flights to and fro.

So they wrestle, the long-rested ones,
and seize each other with their naked teeth
and grow afraid, because they bleed no more,
and search, where the eye-sockets gape,
with cold fingers for the dead tears.
And grow weary. A few minutes
after their morning the evening breaks in.
They turn grave and leave one another alone
and are ready to rise up in the storm,
when on the bright wine of your love
the dark drops of your wrath appear,
to be near to your judgment.
And then it begins, after the great cry:
the over-great, fearful silence.
They all sit as if before black doors
in a light that, as with ulcers,
strews them with many garish spots.

And growing, the evening turns old and late.
And nights then fall in great chunks
upon their hands and upon their backs,
which, swaying, load themselves with a black burden.
They wait long. Their shoulders sway
under the pressure like a dark sea,
they sit as if sunk in thought,
and yet are empty.
Why do they prop their brows?
Their brains think somewhere
deep in the earth, caved-in, wrinkled:
the whole old earth thinks mightily,
and its great trees rustle so.

All-Beholding, do you remember this pale
and fearful image, which has no like
among the images of your will?
Have you no fear of this mute city
that, hanging on you like a withered leaf,
wants to lift itself toward the sign of your wrath?
O, grip all the days by the spokes,
that they not come too soon to this end,–
perhaps you may yet manage to evade
the great silence that we both have seen.
Perhaps you can still raise one of us
who takes from this fearful living-again
its meaning, its longing, and its soul,
one who is enraged to his very ground
and yet swims gladly through all things,
a careless spender of forces,
who fiddles himself on every string
and, unharmed, an unrecognized diver,
descends into all the deaths.
... Or how do you hope to bear this day,
which is longer than the lengths of all days,
with the terrible songs of its silence,
when the Angels then, like nothing but questions,
throng you with their dreadful beating of wings?
See how they hang trembling in their pinions
and lament to you with a hundred thousand eyes,
and the voices of their gentle song no longer
dare to lift themselves out of the many
confused transitions to the clear tones.
And when the old men with the broad beards,
who counseled you in the best victories,
only softly rock their white heads,
and when the women who nursed the Son for you,
and those seduced by him, the companions,
and all the virgins who gave themselves to him:
the bright birches of your dark gardens,–
who shall help you, if they all fell silent?

And only your Son would rise among those
who sit around your throne.
Would your voice then dig itself into his heart?
Would your lonely pain then say:
Son!
Would you then seek the face
of him who called the judgment,
your judgment and your throne:
Son!
Would you, Father, then bid your heir,
softly accompanied by Magdalens,
descend to those
who long to die again?

That would be your last royal decree,
the last grace and the last hatred;
but then all would come to rest:
heaven and the judgment and you.
All the garments of the world’s riddle,
which so long keeps itself veiled,
fall with this clasp.
... But I am afraid....
All-Beholding, see how afraid I am,
measure my torment!
I am afraid that you long ago passed away,
when for the first time,
in your grasping-of-all,
you saw the image of this pale
face,
to which you draw helplessly near, All-Beholding.
Did you flee back then?
Where to?
More trusting
none can come to you
than I,
I who will not
betray you for reward
like all the pious ones.
I only want, because I am hidden
and weary like you, perhaps wearier still,
and because my fear of the great judgment
is like yours,
I want to fasten myself close,
face beside face,
to you;
with a few forces
we will fend off the great wheel
over which the mighty waters go,
that rush and snort–
for: Woe, they will rise again.
Such is their faith: great and without grace.

Kings in legends
are like mountains in the evening. They dazzle
everyone toward whom they turn.
The girdles about their loins
and the weighing-down ends of their mantles
are worth lands and lives.
With the richly clad hands
goes, slender and naked, the sword.

A young king from the North was
beaten in the Ukraine.
He hated spring and women’s hair
and the harps and what they say.
He rode upon a gray horse,
his eye looked out gray
and had never craved a radiance
at the feet of a woman.
None was blond to his glance,
none had been able to kiss him;
and when he was angry,
he tore a moon of pearls
out of some beautiful hair.
And when grief came over him,
he tamed a girl
and inquired whose ring she had taken
and to whom she gave her own–
and: hunted her bridegroom
to death with a hundred hounds.

And he left his gray land,
which was without a voice,
and rode into a resistance
and fought for the sake of danger,
until the wonder overcame him:
as if dreaming, his hand passed
from iron band to iron band
and there was no sword in it;
he had awakened to beholding:

the lovely battle flattered
about his willfulness.
He sat on horseback: not a gesture
around him escaped him.
On silver, ring now spoke to ring,
and there was a voice in every thing,
and as in many bells there hung
the soul of every thing.
And the wind too was greatly other,
which sprang into the banners,
slender as a panther, breathless
and reeling from the trumpet-blast
that wrestled, laughing, with it.
And sometimes the wind reached down:
there walked a bleeding one,–a boy
who beat the drum;
he carried it always up and down
and bore it like his heart into the grave
before his dead procession.
Then many a mountain was clenched,
as though the earth were not yet old
and were only building itself up;
now the iron stood like basalt,
now there swayed like an evening forest,
with a broad, rising shape,
the greatly moving throng.
The darkness steamed dully,
what darkened was not the time,–
and everything turned gray,
but already a new log fell,
and again the flame grew broad
and was fanned as for a feast.
They attacked: in foreign dress
a swarm of fantastic provinces;
how all the iron suddenly laughs:
from a silver-bright prince
the evening battle shimmered up.
The banners fluttered like joys,
and all of them, kingly,
had in their gestures a squandering,–
on far flaming buildings
the stars kindled themselves....

And it was night. And the battle drew softly
back like a very weary sea
that brought many foreign dead,
and all the dead were heavy.
Carefully the gray horse went
(fended off by great fists)
through men who died as strangers,
and stepped onto flat black grass.
He who sat upon the gray horse
saw below, upon the moist colors,
much silver like shattered glass.
Saw iron wither, helmets drink
and swords stand in the seam of armor,
dying hands he saw waving
with a shred of brocade...

And did not see it.

And rode after the din
of the field-battle, as if he swarmed in rapture,
with his cheeks full of warmth
and with the eyes of lovers....

My father was a banished
king from over the sea.
There came to him once an envoy:
his cloak was a panther,
and his sword was heavy.

My father was, as ever,
without helmet and ermine;
the room grew dark
as ever, poor, around him.
His hands were trembling
and were pale and empty,–
into imageless walls
he stared without a gaze.

Mother walked in the garden
and moved, white, through the green,
and wanted to await the wind
before the evening-glow.
I dreamed that she would call me,
but she walked alone,–
let me, from the edge of the steps,
listen to the fading hoofbeats
and on into the house:

Father! The strange envoy...?
He rides off again in the wind....
What did he want? He knew
your blond hair, my child.

Father! How he was arrayed!
How the cloak flowed from him!
Forged and made supple
were shoulder, breast, and steed.
He was a voice in the steel,
he was a man out of night,–
but he has brought with him
a slender crown.
It rang at every step
against his very heavy sword,
the pearl at its center
is worth many lives.
From wrathful seizing
the circlet is bent,
which had often fallen:
it is a child’s crown,–
for kings go without;
–give it to my hair!
I will wear it now and then
on nights, pale with shame.
And will tell you, father,
where the envoy came from.
What things are worth out there,
whether the city stands of stone,
or whether in tents
they have waited for me.

My father was an aggrieved man
and knew but little rest.
He listened to me, his brow
veiled, the nights long through.
The ring lay in my hair.
And I spoke quite near and soft,
so that mother would not wake,–
who thought upon the same,
when she, left all in white,
before the evening masses
walked through dark gardens.

So we became dreaming fiddlers,
who step softly out of the doors,
to look about, before they pray,
whether some neighbor listens in.
Who only, when all have scattered,
behind the last evening-bell,
play the songs, behind which
(like forest in wind behind fountains)
the dark violin-case rustles.
For only then are the voices good,
when silences go with them,
when behind the converse of the strings
sounds remain as if of blood;
and anxious and senseless are the times,
when behind their vanities
nothing holds sway that rests.

Patience: the quiet hand goes round,
and what was promised will come to be:
we are the whisperers before the silent one,
we are the meadows before the grove;
in them a dark humming still moves–
(many voices, and yet no choir)
and they make ready for the mute
deep and holy groves....

A CYCLE OF POEMS (1899 and 1906)

I

That was in days when the mountains came:
the trees reared up, the not-yet-tamed,
and rushing into its armor rose the river.
Two foreign pilgrims called out a name,
and waked out of his long lameness
was Ilya, the giant of Murom.

The old parents broke their backs in the fields
against the stones and the wild growth;
then came the son, full-grown, from his wakeners
and forced the furrows into the fear of the plow.
He lifted the trunks that stood like warriors,
and laughed at their wavering weight,
and, startled up like black snakes, the roots
that had known only the dark
writhed in the broad grip of the light.

In the early dew the mare gathered strength,
in whose veins power and nobility slept;
she ripened under her rider’s weight,
her neighing was like a voice gone deep,–
and both of them felt how the uncertain
called to them with promising dangers.

And ride, and ride... perhaps a thousand years.
Who counts the time, once a man so wills.
(Perhaps he also sat a thousand years still.)
The real is like the marvelous:
it measures the world by self-willed measures;
millennia are too young for it.

Far will they stride, who long have sat
in their deep dusk.

II

Still great birds threaten on every side,
and dragons glow and everywhere keep watch
on the forests’ wonders and the ravines’ fall;
and boys grow up, and men anoint
themselves for the combat with the nightingale,

which up in the crowns of nine oaks
beds itself like a thousandfold beast,
and at evening a crying goes forth beyond compare,
a crying reaching-to-the-very-end,
and goes forth from her the whole night long;

the spring night, which more terrible than all
and heavier was, and more fearful to withstand:
all around no sign of an assault
and yet everything full of passing-over,
flinging itself down and giving itself piece by piece,
yes, that Something which reached around it,
still calling out, trembling in its whole body
and going under in it like a ship.

These were the over-strong, who stayed,
not worn away by this enormous thing
that broke from the throats as out of craters;
they endured, and aging little by little
they grasped the dread of the Aprils,
and their quiet hands held many

and led them through fear and hardship
to days when, gladder and healthier,
they built the walls about the city-founders,
who sat above it all, good and knowing.

And at last there came onto the first roads
out of caves and hated ambushes
the beasts that had been held implacable.
They climbed in silence out of their excess
(shamed and outdated powers)
and laid themselves obedient before the elders.

III

His servants feed with more and more
a pack of those wild rumors,
which are still He as well, all of it still He.

His favorites flee away before him.

And his women whisper and forge
leagues. And he hears them, deep within
in their chambers, with serving-women
who glance about shyly, speaking of poisons.

All the walls are hollow with cabinets and compartments,
murderers crouch beneath the roofs
and play at monks with much skill.

And he has nothing but a glance
now and then; but the soft
step on the stairs that wind;
nothing but the iron on his staff.

Nothing but the meager penitent’s robe
(through which the cold from the flagstones
creeps up him as if with claws),
nothing that he dares to call,
nothing but the fear of all of these,
nothing but the daily fear of all,
that hunts him through these hunted

faces, along dark, unquestioned,
perhaps guilty hands.
Sometimes he seizes one in the passage
just barely by the folds of his cloak,
and drags him angrily near;
but at the window he no longer knows:
Who is the holder? Who is the held?
Who am I, and who is that?

IV

It is the hour when the empire, vain,
beholds itself in its splendor’s many mirrors.

The pale Tsar, the last link of the line,
dreams on the throne, before which the feast goes on,
and softly trembles the shamed crown of his head
and his hand, which before the purple armrests
with an undefined longing
flees into the tangled uncertain.

And about his silence boyars bow
in bright cuirasses and in panther-skins,
like many strange and princely dangers
that hem him in with mute impatience.
Deep into the hall their reverence beats its waves.

And they call to mind another Tsar,
who often, with words that were of madness,
struck their foreheads against the stones.
And so they think on: that one left
not so much room, when he sat upon the throne,
empty on the withered velvet of the cushion.

He was the dark measure of things,
and the boyars had long forgotten
that the seat of the chair was red, so heavily
lay his robe and spread out golden.

And further they think: the imperial garment
falls asleep upon the shoulders of this boy.
Although throughout the hall the torches flicker,
pale are the pearls that in seven rows
like white children kneel about his neck,
and the rubies on the sleeve’s points,
that once were goblets clear with wine,
are black as slag–

And their thinking swells.

It presses hard upon the pale emperor,
upon whose head the crown grows ever softer
and to whom the will grows ever stranger;
he smiles. Louder the praisers test him,
their bowing draws near, they flatter hoarsely,
and a blade has clinked in the dream.

V

The pale Tsar will not die by the sword,
the strange longing makes him sacrosanct;
he will inherit the solemn realms
on which his gentle soul sickens.

Already now, stepping to a Kremlin window,
he sees a Moscow, whiter, more unbounded,
woven into his at-last-finished night;
just as it is in the first working of spring,
when in the lanes the scent of birches
trembles with loud morning bells.

The great bells, that peal so masterfully,
are his fathers, those first Tsars,
who, still before the days of the Tatars,
out of legends, adventures, and dangers,
out of wrath and humility slowly built themselves up.

And he grasps all at once who they were,
and that often, for the meaning of their darkness,
they dived down into his own depths
and used him, the softest of the illustrious,
up in their deeds, great and devout,
long before his beginning.

And a gratitude comes over him,
that they gave him away so lavishly
to the thirst and drive of all things.
He was the force behind their exuberance,
the golden ground before which their broad life
seemed mysteriously to darken.

In all their works he beholds himself
like inlaid silver in ornaments,
and there is no deed among their deeds
that was not also in his quiet states,
in which all action’s red grew pale.

VI

Still the sapphires gaze in the silver plates
like deep women’s eyes,
gold tendrils twine like slender beasts
that couple in the gleam of their heat,
and gentle pearls wait in the shadow
of wild figures, for a shimmer to find
their still faces and lose them again.
And this is mantle, halo of rays, and land,
and a movement goes from edge to edge,
like grain in the wind and like a river in the valley,
so it gleams, shifting, across the frame-wall.

In its sun three ovals darken:
the great one gives the mother’s countenance room,
and right and left an almond-slender
virgin’s hand lifts from the silver hem.
The two hands, strangely still and brown,
proclaim that in the precious icon
the Queenly One dwells as in a cloister,
she who will overflow with that Son,
with that drop, in which, cloudless,
the never-hoped-for heavens turn blue.

The hands still bear witness to it;
but the countenance has opened like a door
into warm dusks,
into which the smile from the gracious cheeks
strayed and lost itself with its light.

Then the Tsar bows low before it and speaks:
Did you not feel how deeply we pressed into you
with everything: feeling, fearing, and longing;
we wait for your dear face,
which is lost to us; lost away to where?

For the great saints it does not pass away.

He trembled deep within his stiff garment,
which stood radiant. He did not know how far
he already was from everything and their blessing,
how blessedly near in his solitude.

Still the pale Gossudar muses and muses.
And his face, which beneath the sick hair
had long been deep and as if departing,
passed away, like that one in the golden oval,
into his great golden robe.

(In order to meet her countenance.)

Two golden garments shimmered in the hall
and grew clear in the gleam of the hanging lamps.

TO THE MEMORY OF PAULA BECKER-MODERSOHN

You pale child, at every evening
the singer shall stand, darkly, among your things
and shall bring you legends that ring in the blood
across the bridge of his voice
and a harp, his hands full of it.

Not out of time is what he tells you,
it is lifted as if from tapestries;
such figures have never existed;–
and what never was he calls life.
And today he has chosen this song:

You blond child of princes and of women
who waited, lonely, in the white hall,–
almost all were anxious to build you up,
to gaze upon you one day out of the paintings:
upon your eyes with their grave brows,
upon your hands, bright and slender.

You have from them pearls and turquoises,
from these women who stand in paintings
as if they stood alone in evening meadows,–
you have from them pearls and turquoises,–
and rings with darkened mottoes
and silks that breathe faded scents.

You carry the gems of their girdle-bands
to the high window, into the gleam of the hours,
and into the silk of soft bridal gowns
your little books are bound,
and within them you have, mighty over lands,
found your name written quite large
and in rich, round letters.

And everything is as if it had already happened.

They have, as though you would come no more,
set their mouths to every cup,
hounded their feeling toward every joy
and watched no sorrow without suffering;
so that now you
stand and are ashamed.

... You pale child, your life too is a life,–
the singer comes to tell you that you are.
And that you are more than a dream of the grove,
more than the bliss of the sunshine
that many a gray day forgets.
Your life is so unspeakably your own,
because it is overladen by many.

Do you feel how the pasts
grow light, when you live a while,
how gently they prepare you for wonders,
accompany each feeling with images,–
and whole ages seem only a sign
for a gesture that you beautifully raise.–

This is the meaning of all that once was,
that it does not stay with its whole weight,
that it returns into our being,
woven into us, deep and marvelous:
So these women were of ivory,
reddened by the glow of many roses,
so the weary royal faces darkened,
so pale princely mouths turned to stone
and unmoved by orphans and by weepers,
so boys rang out like violins
and died for the heavy hair of women;
so virgins went to serve the Madonna,
to whom the world was a confusion.
So lutes grew loud, and mandolins,
into which an unknown one struck more greatly,–
into warm velvet the daggers’ edge ran out,–
fates built themselves from luck and faith,
farewells sobbed up in the evening arbors,–
and over a hundred black iron helmets
the field-battle swayed like a ship.
So cities slowly grew great and fell
back into themselves like the waves of a sea,
so toward highly rewarded goals there pressed
the swift bird-force of the iron spear,
so children adorned themselves for garden-games,–
and so the unimportant and the heavy happened
only, for this daily living,
to give you a thousand great parables
on which you can grow mightily.
Pasts are planted in you,
to rise out of you, like gardens.

You pale child, you make the singer rich
with your fate, which lets itself be sung:
so a great garden-feast is mirrored
with many lights in the astonished pond.
In the dark poet each single thing
repeats itself, quietly: a star, a house, a wood.
And many things that he would celebrate
stand around your touching form.

You strange men who now stand so still
in paintings, you sat well on horseback,
and impatiently you walked through the house;
like a beautiful hound, with the same gesture
your hands now rest beside you.

Your face is so full of beholding,
for the world was image and image to you;
out of weapons, banners, fruits, and women
this great trust wells up in you,
that everything is and that everything counts.

But back then, when you were still too young
to fight the great battles,
too young to wear the papal purple,
not always lucky at riding and the hunt,
boys still, who deny themselves to women,
have you from those boyhood days
no, not one memory?

Do you no longer know what was, back then?

Back then there was the altar
with the painting on which Mary gave birth,
in the lonely side-aisle.
A spray of flowers
seized you;
the thought
that the fountain, alone
out in the garden in the moonlight,
threw up its waters,
was like a world.

The window opened to the floor like a door;
and there was park, with meadows and paths:
strangely near and yet so remote,
strangely bright and yet as if hidden,
and the fountains rushed like rain,
and it was as if no morning would come
to meet this long night
that stood with all its stars.

Back then, boys, the hand grew on you,
the hand that was warm. (But you did not know it.)
Back then your face spread wide.

Like birds that have grown used to walking
and grow ever heavier, as if in falling:
the earth sucks from their long claws
the brave remembrance of all
the great things that happened high above,
and makes them almost into leaves, that keep
close to the ground–
like growths that,
barely growing upward, creep into the earth,
in black clods, lifeless-bright
and soft and moist, sink down and wither away,
like deranged children,–like a face
in a coffin,–like glad hands that
grow irresolute, because in the full chalice
things are mirrored that are not near,–
like cries for help that in the evening wind
meet with many dark great bells,–
like potted flowers, dry for days now,
like alleys of ill repute,–like curls
in which gemstones have gone blind,–
like morning in April
before all the many windows of the hospital:
the sick crowd at the edge of the ward
and look: the grace of an early ray
makes all the streets spring-like and wide;
they see only the bright glory
that makes the houses young and laughing,
and do not know that all night long already
a storm is tearing the garments from the skies,
a storm of waters, where the world still ices over,
a storm that even now roars through the streets
and that takes from things all the burden
from their shoulders,–
that something out there is great and enraged,
that out there the violence walks, a fist
that would throttle each of the sick
in the midst of this splendor they believe in.–
... Like long nights in withered arbors,
already torn open on every side
and far too wide to weep in still, together
with a second whom one greatly loves,–
like naked girls, coming over stones,
like drunkards in a grove of birches,–
like words that mean nothing definite
and yet go on, go into the ear, on
into the brain, and secretly on the ladder of nerves
try, leap by leap, through every limb,
like old men who curse their lineage
and then pass away, so that none could ever
turn aside the destined woe,
like full-blown roses, artificially raised
in the blue hothouse, where the airs were lying,
and then, out of wantonness, in a great arc
scattered out into the drifted snow,–
like an earth that cannot turn,
because too many dead weigh down its feeling,
like a slain and hastily buried man
whose hands fight against the roots,–
like one of the tall, slender, red
high-summer flowers, which, unredeemed,
quite suddenly dies in the meadows’ favorite wind,
because its root below strikes against turquoises
in the ear-pendant of a dead woman....

And the hours of many days were so.
As if someone were shaping my likeness somewhere,
to mistreat it slowly with needles.
I felt each point of his games,
and was as if a rain were falling on me,
in which all things transform themselves.

NINE LEAVES WITH A TITLE-LEAF

TITLE-LEAF

The rich and the fortunate do well to keep silent,
no one wants to know what they are.
But the needy must show themselves,
must say: I am blind,
or: I am about to become so,
or: things are not going well for me on earth,
or: I have a sick child,
or: here I am, pieced together....

And perhaps that is not enough at all.

And because everyone else, as past things,
walks past them, they must sing.

And there one still hears good singing.

Of course people are strange; they would rather
hear castrati in boys’ choirs.

But God himself comes and stays long,
when these gelded ones disturb him.

THE BEGGAR’S SONG

I go always from gate to gate,
rained-on and sunburnt;
all at once I lay my right ear
into my right hand.
Then my voice seems to me
as if I had never known it.

Then I do not know for sure who is crying there,
I or someone else.
I cry out for a trifle.
The poets cry out for more.

And at last I close my face
with both eyes;
as it lies then in my hand with its weight,
it looks almost like rest.
So that they will not think I have nowhere
to lay my head.

THE BLIND MAN’S SONG

I am blind, you out there, that is a curse,
a revulsion, a contradiction,
something daily and heavy.
I lay my hand on the woman’s arm,
my gray hand on her gray gray,
and she leads me through sheer emptiness.

You stir and shift and imagine
that you sound different from stone on stone,
but you are mistaken: I alone
live and suffer and make my din.
In me is an endless screaming,
and I do not know whether my
heart is screaming, or my bowels.

Do you know the songs? You did not sing them,
not quite in this intonation.
To you each morning the new light comes
warm into the open dwelling.
And you have a feeling from face to face,
and that tempts you to be sparing.

THE DRINKER’S SONG

It was not in me. It went out and in.
Then I wanted to hold it. Then the wine held it.
(I no longer know what it was.)
Then he held me this and held me that,
until I relied on him entirely.
Fool that I am.

Now I am in his game, and he scatters
me contemptuously about and loses me this very day
to that beast, to death.
When death wins me, a dirty card,
he scratches his gray scab with me
and throws me off into the muck.

THE SUICIDE’S SONG

So, one moment more.
That they cut my rope through
again and again.
The other day I was so well prepared,
and there was already a little eternity
in my entrails.

They hold the spoon out to me,
this spoon of life.
No, I will and I will no more,
let me bring myself up.

I know that life is done and good,
and the world is a full pot,
but it does not go into my blood,
it only rises to my head.

It nourishes others, me it makes sick;
understand that one spurns it.
For at least a thousand years
I now need a diet.

THE WIDOW’S SONG

In the beginning life was good to me.
It kept me warm, it gave me courage.
That it does this for all the young,
how could I have known it then.
I did not know what life was–,
all at once it was only year on year,
no longer good, no longer new, no longer wonderful,
as if torn in two down the middle.

It was not his fault, nor mine;
we both had nothing but patience,
but death has none.
I saw him coming (how ill he came),
and I watched him as he took and took:
it was not mine at all.

What then was mine; my own, mine?
Was not even my wretchedness
only lent to me by fate?
Fate wants not only the good fortune,
it wants the pain and the screaming back,
and it buys up the ruin secondhand.

Fate was there and acquired for a nothing
every expression of my face,
down to the way of walking.
It was a daily clearance-sale,
and when I was empty, it gave me up
and left me standing open.

THE IDIOT’S SONG

They do not hinder me. They let me go.
They say nothing can happen.
How good.
Nothing can happen. Everything comes and circles
forever around the Holy Ghost,
around that certain ghost (you know)–,
how good.

No, one really must not think there is
any danger in it.
There is, of course, the blood.
The blood is the heaviest. The blood is heavy,
sometimes I think I cannot go on–.
(How good.)

Ah, what a beautiful ball this is;
red and round as an everywhere.
Good that you created it.
Will it come, I wonder, when one calls?

How strangely all this behaves,
drives into itself, swims apart:
friendly, a little undefined;
how good.

THE ORPHAN’S SONG

I am no one and will be no one too.
Now I am still too small to be;
but later as well.

Mothers and fathers,
have mercy on me.

True, it is not worth the trouble of tending:
I will be mown down anyway.
No one can use me: now it is too early,
and tomorrow it is too late.

I have only this one dress,
it grows thin, and it fades,
but it will last an eternity
even before God perhaps.

I have only this little bit of hair
(it always stayed the same),
that once was one man’s dearest thing.

Now he loves nothing anymore.

THE DWARF’S SONG

My soul perhaps is straight and good;
but my heart, my crooked blood,
all that which gives me pain,
it cannot carry upright.
It has no garden, it has no bed,
it hangs upon my sharp skeleton
with horrified beating of wings?

From my hands too nothing more will come.
See how stunted they are, look here:
tough, they hop, moist and heavy,
like little toads after rain.
And the rest of me is
worn-out and old and dreary;
why does God hesitate to lay
all of it on the dung-heap?

Is he angry with me for my face
with its sullen mouth?
It was so often ready, after all,
to grow quite light and clear at bottom;
but nothing ever came so close to it
as the big dogs.
And the dogs do not have that.

THE LEPER’S SONG

Look, I am one whom everything has forsaken.
No one in the city knows of me,
leprosy has befallen me.
And I beat my rattle-work,
knock my sorrowful notice
into the ears of all
who pass close by.
And those who hear it woodenly do not
even look over, and what has happened here
they do not want to learn.

As far as the sound of my rattle reaches,
I am at home; but perhaps
you make my rattle so loud
that no one dares into my distance
who now shrinks from my nearness.
So that I can walk a very long time
without discovering girl, woman, or man,
or child.

I do not want to frighten the animals.

All at once I know much of the fountains,
those incomprehensible trees of glass.
I could speak of them as of my own tears,
which, seized by very great dreams,
I once squandered and then forgot.

Did I forget, then, that the heavens reach hands
to many things and into the throng?
Did I not always see greatness beyond compare
in the rising of old parks before the soft
expectant evenings,–in pale
songs climbing out of strange girls,
that overflow out of the melody
and become real and, as if they must,
mirror themselves in the opened ponds?

I have only to remember all of it,
what happened to the fountains and to me,
then I feel too the weight of the down-falling
in which I saw the waters again:
and know of branches that turned downward,
of voices that burned with a little flame,
of ponds that only repeated the bank’s edges,
witlessly and askew,
of evening skies that, from charred
western forests, stepped wholly estranged,
arched otherwise, darkened, and behaved
as though that were not the world they had meant....

Did I forget, then, that star beside star turns to stone
and shuts itself against the neighbor-globes?
That the worlds know one another only
as if wept-out, in space?–Perhaps we are above,
woven into the heaven of other beings
who look up to us at evening. Perhaps their poets
praise us. Perhaps many pray
up toward us. Perhaps we are the targets
of strange curses that never reach us,
neighbors of a god whom they mean
at our height, when they weep alone,
in whom they believe and whom they lose,
and whose image, like a gleam out of their
seeking lamps, fleeting and blown away,
passes over our scattered faces....

I had been reading long. Since this afternoon,
rustling with rain, lay against the windows.
Of the wind outside I heard no more:
my book was heavy.
I looked into its pages as into faces
that grow dark with thoughtfulness,
and around my reading time dammed up.–
All at once the pages are overshone,
and instead of the anxious tangle of words
there stands: evening, evening... everywhere upon them;
I do not yet look out, and yet the long lines
tear, and the words roll
away from their threads, wherever they will....
Then I know it: above the overfull
glistening gardens the skies are wide;
the sun was to come once more.–
And now it grows summer-night, as far as one can see:
into too few groups the scattered things arrange themselves,
darkly along long paths the people go,
and strangely far, as if it meant more,
one hears the little that still happens.

And when I now lift my eyes from the book,
nothing will be strange, and everything great.
Out there is what I live in here,
and here and there everything is boundless;
only that I weave myself still more into it,
when my glances fit themselves to things
and to the grave simplicity of the masses,–
there the earth grows out beyond itself.
It seems to embrace the whole sky:
the first star is like the last house.

I read the storms in the trees,
which out of days turned lukewarm
beat against my anxious windows,
and I hear the distances say things
that I cannot bear without a friend,
cannot love without a sister.

There goes the storm, a transformer,
goes through the forest and through time,
and everything is as if without age:
the landscape, like a verse in the Psalter,
is gravity and force and eternity.

How small is that with which we wrestle,
how great is that which wrestles with us;
if we would let ourselves, more like the things,
be so overcome by the great storm,–
we would grow wide and nameless.

What we conquer is the small,
and the success itself makes us small.
The eternal and the uncommon
will not be bent by us.
This is the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when his adversary’s sinews
stretch metallic in the struggle,
he feels them beneath his fingers
like strings of deep melodies.

Whomever this Angel overcame,
who so often renounces the fight,
he walks out justified and upright
and great from that hard hand,
which, as if shaping, nestled against him.
The victories do not invite him.
His growth is this: to be the deeply defeated
by ever greater things.

EIGHT LEAVES WITH A TITLE-LEAF

TITLE-LEAF

The night, moved by the swelling storm,
how it grows all at once so wide,–
as if otherwise it stayed folded up
into the petty creases of time.
Where the stars hold it off, there it does not end
and does not begin in the middle of the forest
and not at my face
and not with your form.
The lamps stammer and do not know:
do we lie light?
Is the night the only reality
for thousands of years....

On such nights you can meet, in the alleys,
the future ones, narrow pale
faces that do not know you
and let you pass in silence.
But if they began to speak,
you would be a long-departed one,
as you stand there,
long-decayed.
Yet they keep to their silence like the dead,
although they are the coming ones.
The future has not yet begun.
They only hold their face into time
and cannot see, as if under water;
and if they bear it a while,
they see, as under the waves: the hurry
of fishes and the diving of ropes.

On such nights the prisons open.
And through the evil dreams of the guards
go, with soft laughter,
the despisers of their power.
Forest! They come to you, to sleep in you,
hung with their long sentences.
Forest!

On such nights there is suddenly fire
in an opera house. Like a monster
the giant room with its tiers begins
to chew the thousands
who throng within it.
Men and women
jam together in the aisles,
and as they all hang on one another,
the masonry breaks, and it tears them along.
And no one knows any longer who suffered at the very bottom;
while someone is already trampling his heart,
his ears are still quite full of the sounds
that go along with it....

On such nights, as in many bygone days,
the hearts in the sarcophagi
of vanished princes begin to beat again:
and so mightily their beating-anew presses
against the shells that resist,
that they carry the golden bowls onward
through darkness and damasks that crumble.
Black sways the cathedral with all its halls.
The bells that claw themselves into the towers
hang like birds, the doors stand trembling,
and on the supports every limb shudders:
as if its founding granite were borne
by blind tortoises that stir.

On such nights the incurable ones know:
We were....
And among the sick they think
a simple good thought
onward, there, where it broke off.
But of the sons they have left behind,
the youngest perhaps walks in the loneliest alleys;
for just these nights
are to him as if he thought for the first time:
long it lay leaden upon him,
but now everything will unveil itself,–
and: that he will celebrate this,
he feels....

On such nights all the cities are alike,
all hung with flags.
And seized by the storm by their banners
and torn out as if by the hair
into some land with uncertain
outlines and rivers.
In every garden then there is a pond,
by every pond the same house,
in every house the same light;
and all people look alike
and hold their hands before their face.

On such nights the dying grow clear,
reach softly into their growing hair,
whose stalks drive out of their skull’s weakness
in these long days,
as though they wished to stay above the surface
of death.
Their gesture goes through the house,
as if mirrors hung everywhere;
and they spend–with this digging
in their hair–forces
that they have gathered over years,
years that passed away.

On such nights my little sister grows,
she who was before me and died before me, quite small.
Many such nights have been since then:
she must be beautiful by now. Soon someone will
woo her.

The Stranger:
You are not afraid to speak of it?
The Blind Woman:
No.
It is so far away. That was another.
The one who saw then, who lived aloud and seeing,
she died.
The Stranger:
And had a hard death?
The Blind Woman:
Dying is a cruelty to the unsuspecting.
One must be strong, even when a stranger dies.
The Stranger:
She was a stranger to you?
The Blind Woman:
–Or: she became one.
Death estranges even the mother from the child.–
Yet it was terrible in the first days.
Over my whole body I was raw. The world,
which blooms and ripens in things,
was torn out of me by the roots,
with my heart (it seemed to me), and I lay
like upturned earth, open, and drank
the cold rain of my tears,
which from the dead eyes streamed unceasingly
and softly, as from empty heavens,
when God has died, the clouds fall.
And my hearing was great and open to everything.
I heard things that are not audible:
time, that flowed over my hair,
the silence, that rang in delicate glasses,
and felt: close beside my hands moved
the breath of a great white rose.
And again and again I thought: night, and: night,
and believed I saw a bright streak
that would grow like a day;
and believed I was going toward the morning
that had long lain in my hands.
I woke my mother, when sleep fell heavy
down from my dark face,
to my mother I cried: "You, come here!
Make light!"
And listened. Long, long it stayed still,
and I felt my pillows saying no,–
then it was as if I saw something shine:
that was my mother’s aching weeping,
of which I will no longer think.
Make light! Make light! I often screamed it in dream:
The room has caved in. Take the room
from my face and from my breast.
You must lift it, lift it high,
must give it back again to the stars;
I cannot live like this, with the sky upon me.
But am I speaking to you, mother?
Or to whom, then? Who is behind it?
Who is behind the curtain?–Winter?
Mother: storm? Mother: night? Say!
Or: day?... Day!
Without me! How can it be day without me?
Am I missing nowhere?
Does no one ask after me?
Are we then quite forgotten?
We?... But you are there;
you still have everything, do you not?
About your face all things still take pains
to do it good.
When your eyes rest
and however tired they were,
they can rise again.
... Mine are silent.
My flowers will lose their color.
My mirrors will freeze over.
In my books the lines will grow over.
My birds will flutter about in the alleys
and wound themselves on strange windows.
Nothing is joined to me anymore.
I am forsaken by everything.–
I am an island.
The Stranger:
And I have come across the sea.
The Blind Woman:
What? Onto the island?... Come here?
The Stranger:
I am still in the boat.
I have moored it softly–
to you. It is astir:
its flag blows landward.
The Blind Woman:
I am an island and alone.
I am rich.–
At first, when the old paths still ran
in my nerves, worn
by much use:
then I suffered too.
Everything went out of my heart,
I did not know at first where to;
but then I found them all there,
all the feelings, that which I am,
stood gathered and pressed and screamed
at the walled-up eyes that did not stir.
All my seduced feelings....
I do not know whether they stood so for years,
but I know of the weeks
when they all came back broken
and knew no one.
Then the way to the eyes grew shut.
I no longer know it.
Now everything moves about in me,
sure and carefree; like convalescents
the feelings go, savoring the walking,
through the dark house of my body.
Some are readers
over memories;
but the young ones
all look outward.
For where they step out to my edge,
my garment is of glass.
My forehead sees, my hand read
poems in other hands.
My foot speaks with the stones it treads,
my voice every bird carries off
out of the daily walls.
I need do without nothing now,
all colors are translated
into sound and smell.
And they ring infinitely beautiful
as tones.
What do I want with a book?
In the trees the wind turns pages;
and I know what words are there,
and repeat them sometimes softly.
And death, that breaks eyes like flowers,
does not find my eyes....
The Stranger (softly):
I know.

DEDICATED TO CLARA WESTHOFF

For an hour now there is one thing more
on earth. One wreath the more.
A while ago this was light foliage... I wound it:
and now this ivy is strangely heavy
and so full of darkness, as if it drank
future nights out of my things.
Now I almost dread this next night,
alone with this wreath that I have made,
not guessing that something is coming to be
when the tendrils round themselves about the hoop;
wholly bent only on grasping this:
that something can no longer be. As if strayed
into never-trodden thoughts, in which strange things stand
that I must have seen once before....

... Downstream drift the flowers that the
children tore in their play; from the open
fingers one fell, and one, until the bouquet was
no longer to be known. Until the remnant they brought
home was just good enough for burning.
Then one could indeed, the whole night through, when
everyone thinks one asleep, weep for the broken
flowers.

Gretel, from the very first
it was appointed you to die very early,
to die blond.
Long before you were appointed to live.

So the Lord set a sister before you
and then a brother,
that there might be before you two near ones, two pure ones,
who would show you the dying,
yours:
your dying.
Your brother and sister were invented
only that you might grow used to it
and, by two hours of dying,
be reconciled to the third
that has threatened you for thousands of years.
For your death
lives were raised up;
hands that bound blossoms,
glances that felt the roses red
and human beings mightily,
were formed and destroyed again,
and the dying was composed twice,
before it, turned against you yourself,
stepped from the extinguished stage.

... Did it draw near you terribly, beloved playmate?
was it your enemy?
Did you weep yourself onto its heart?
Did it tear you from the hot pillows
into the flickering night,
in which no one in the whole house slept...?
What did it look like?
You must know it....
For this you traveled home.
* * * * *
You know
how the almonds bloom,
and that lakes are blue.
Many things that are only in the feeling of the woman
who has known first love,
you know. Nature whispered into you,
in the South’s late-dusking days,
so endless a beauty
as otherwise only blessed lips speak it
of blessed people who, in twos,
have one world and one voice–
more softly you sensed it all,–
(oh how the infinitely grim
touched your infinite humility).
Your letters came from the South,
still warm from sun, but orphaned,–
at last you yourself traveled after your weary,
pleading letters;
for you were not happy in the splendor,
every color lay on you like guilt,
and you lived in impatience,
for you knew: this is not the whole.
Life is only a part... Of what?
Life is only a tone... Within what?
Life has meaning only joined with many
circles of the far-and-wide-growing space,–
life is thus only the dream of a dream,
but waking is elsewhere.
So you let it go.
Greatly you let it go.
And we knew you small.
Yours was so little: a smile, a small one,
a little melancholy always,
very soft hair and a small room,
which since your sister’s death was wide to you.
As if all the rest was only your dress,
so it seems to me now, you quiet playmate.
But very much
you were. And we knew it sometimes,
when you came in the evening into the hall;
knew sometimes: now one ought to pray;
a multitude has entered,
a multitude that follows after you,
because you know the way.
And you must have known it
and you knew it
yesterday....
Youngest of the sisters.

Look here,
this wreath is so heavy.
And they will lay it upon you,
this heavy wreath.
Can your coffin bear it?
If it breaks
under the black weight,
ivy creeps
into the folds
of your dress.
Far it climbs up,
all around it twines you,
and the sap that stirs in its tendrils
rouses you with its sound;
so chaste are you.
But you are no longer closed.
Long-drawn-out you are, and slack.
The doors of your body stand ajar,
and wet
the ivy enters....
* * * * *
Like rows
of nuns
who guided themselves
by a black rope,
because it is dark in you, you well-spring.
In the empty passages
of your blood they press toward your heart;
where once your gentle pains
met with pale
joys and memories,
they walk as if in prayer
into the heart that, wholly faded,
dark, stands open to all.
But this wreath is heavy
only in the light,
only among the living, here beside me;
and its weight
is no more,
when I shall lay it beside you.
The earth is full of equilibrium,
your earth.
It is heavy with my eyes that hang upon it,
heavy with the walks
that I have made about it;
the fears of all who saw it
cling to it.
Take it to you, for it is yours,
since it has been wholly finished.
Take it from me.
Leave me alone! It is like a guest....
I am almost ashamed of it.
Are you too afraid, Gretel?

You can no longer walk?
Can no longer stand by me in the room?
Do your feet hurt?
Then stay where now they are all together,
they will bring it to you tomorrow, my child,
along the leafless avenue.
They will bring it to you, wait with good cheer,–
they will bring you more tomorrow.

Even if tomorrow it rages and roars,
that does the flowers little harm.
They will bring them to you. You have the right
to have them surely, my child,
even if tomorrow they are black and bad
and long since passed away.
So do not be afraid. You will no longer
distinguish what rises or sinks;
the colors are closed, and the tones are empty,
and you will no longer even know who
brings you all the flowers.

Now you know the other thing, that casts us out,
as often as we grasp it in the dark;
from what you longed for, you are redeemed
to something that you have.
Among us you were of small stature,
perhaps you are now a grown-up forest
with winds and voices in the leaves.–
Believe me, playmate, no violence was done you:
your death was already old
when your life began;
that is why it set upon it,
so that it should not outlive it.

Did something hover about me?
Did night-wind step in?
I did not tremble.
I am strong and alone.–
What have I made today?

... Ivy-leaves I fetched at evening and wound them
and bent them together, until it wholly obeyed.
Still it shines with a black shine.
And my strength
circles in the wreath.

Death is great.
We are his own
with laughing mouths.
When we think ourselves in the midst of life,
he dares to weep
in the midst of us.