Psalm
[With the voice of the fieldmouse]
On the Term of Exile
No need to drive a nail into the wall
To hang your hat on;
When you come in, just drop it on the chair
No guest has sat on.
Don’t worry about watering the flowers—
In fact, don’t plant them.
You will have gone back home before they bloom,
And who will want them?
If mastering the language is too hard,
Only be patient;
The telegram imploring your return
Won’t need translation.
Remember, when the ceiling sheds itself
In flakes of plaster,
The wall that keeps you out is crumbling too,
As fast or faster.
Translated from the German by Adam Kirsch
1
Under the long green hair of pepper trees,
The writers and composers work the street.
Bach’s new score is crumpled in his pocket,
Dante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat.
2
The city is named for the angels,
And its angels are easy to find.
They give off a lubricant odor,
Their eyes are mascara-lined;
At night you can see them inserting
Gold-plated diaphragms;
For breakfast they gather at poolside
Where screenwriters feed and swim.
3
Every day, I go to earn my bread
In the exchange where lies are marketed,
Hoping my own lies will attract a bid.
4
It’s Hell, it’s Heaven: the amount you earn
Determines if you play the harp or burn.
5
Gold in their mountains,
Oil on their coast;
Dreaming in celluloid
Profits them most.
fromLa Rage de l'expression
Surely we did not need this ( to see an inscrutable sky so
clearly) to consider God a base invention, a vile insinuation,
an impolite proposition, an attempt—alas, successful—at
overwhelming human consciences: those who persuade us
otherwise are traitors or impostors.
Elsewhere, nature longs for skies busy with other things, carting
clouds, for example. Here, the skies are clearly busy with
suffocating nature. Here, it is clear that nature is suffocating.
It remains cloistered beneath an inscrutable sky, tries pathetically
to live. Urns, statues become its interpreters, its supplicants.
But there is no answer: it's splendid
*****
translation by Jeanine Herman
I am not at the crest of the world.
The moment
is not the stylite’s pillar,
time
doesn’t rise from my feet,
doesn’t burst
in my skull in a silent black explosion,
illumination the same as blindness.
I am on the sixth floor,
I am
in a cage hung from time.
Translation by Eliott Weinberger
photograph by Duane Michaels
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
(translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard)
“How would you, comtessa, see the world,
if you — let’s say — had been born as a dachshund?”
— Jakob Johann von Uexküll to his future wife, Gudrun von Schwerin
as a forest. a hunting trip. a ball
that rolls to me and as it reaches
my rug, takes a leap, escapes as a rabbit;
as a warm afternoon, that stretches
and stretches farther out as i do myself,
before another dispatch
of fragrance comes in. it is a system
of signs: hither!, shout the thistles
with their spike-mittens, and every trunk portends
a message, like the waste paper does, textiles,
even the burst bicycle tubing
of an overrun snake.
the fox that runs behind the brook
each evening is the setting sun.
with the excitement of the explorer
who follows the deer tracks;
the wolves and their movable kingdom; and the badger,
striped in black and white like licorice-stick-
candy, lingering in his darkness;
to speed like a pneumatic tube through tunnels
towards the stinging smells, to hunt
him who is a giant, a plump, skittish colossus,
bristling, stiffened in his coat,
while the voices come closer — at the moment
before their arrival, before they burst through clay and earth,
and the two of us are yanked into the light.
as if all the letters had suddenly
floated free of a paper
and formed a swarm in the air;
they form a swarm in the air,
of all that bad news telling us
nothing, those skimpy muses, wispy
pegasuses, only abuzz with the hum
of themselves, made from the last twist
of smoke as the candle is snuffed,
so light you can hardly say: they are –
looking more like shadows, umbrae
jettisoned by another world
to enter our own, they dance, their legs
finer than anything pencil can draw,
with their miniscule sphinx-like bodies;
the rosetta stone, without the stone.
sheep, rooster, duck
September 19, 1783
versailles, its park, all still half asleep,
when from its orbit the balloon floats clear
away. thus claim all historical docs.
no parliament, no riot, just folk –
and his majesty, surrounded by the sweep
of counts, the mistress, and the master
with his telescope, in which the round cup
of the lens hovers. and with one hack
the rope is severed – should it foster
our memorial, that what passed here
by the weathercock will never sleep?
a ball of silk trundling in the hook
of wind, vanishing over barges tossed here,
our subjects sheep and rooster and duck
in their basket barely audible, not a peep
from any one of them. in god’s blue sack,
only pigments, nothing more. and now the rooster
comes, the duck, and finally the sheep.
Muff
when you are digging in the wardrobe
or in the dictionary and toward you
it falls, you begin to think of cave
bear and megaloceros, of the fumes
of moth powder, mites, primeval
extinct things in dioramas:
muff, its single, furry syllable
with the weight of russian novels
where the princess says some word
that escapes you, her cabbage-white-
butterfly-hands hidden in warm hide
while the sled glides across the great
estates, through snow-covered plain
and taiga, with its bells, still ringing
and their glad nightingale song
which fades and you alone remain
behind, with nothing but verst
after verst of darkness, these fiercest
of winds and deepest permafrost
under which the heavy mammoths rest.
