BUT IT’S NOT JUST THE CADAVER

But it’s not just the cadaver,
It’s not just that frightful person who’s no one,
That abysmal variation on the usual body,
That stranger who appears in the absence of the man we knew,
That gaping chasm between our seeing and our understanding—
It’s not just the cadaver that fills the soul with dread
And plants a silence in the bottom of the heart.
The everyday external things of the one who died
Also trouble the soul, and with a more poignant dread.
Even if they belonged to an enemy,
Who can look without nostalgia at the table where this enemy sat,
At the pen with which he wrote?
Who can see without sincere anguish
The coat in whose pockets the dead beggar kept his (now forever absent) hands,
The now horridly tidied-up toys of the dead child,
The rifle the hunter took with him when he vanished beyond every hill?
All of this suddenly weighs on my foreign comprehension,
And a death-sized nostalgia terrifies my soul.

But the Tobacco Shop Owner has come to the door and is standing there.
I look at him with the discomfort of a half-twisted neck
Compounded by the discomfort of a half-grasping soul.
He will die and I will die.
He’ll leave his signboard, I’ll leave my poems.
His sign will also eventually die, and so will my poems.
Eventually the street where the sign was will die,
And so will the language in which my poems were written.
Then the whirling planet where all of this happened will die.

Put time to good use!
But what’s time that I should put it to use?
Put time to good use!
Not a day without a few lines . . .
Honest and first-rate work
Like that of a Virgil or Milton . . .
But to be honest or first-rate is so hard!
To be Milton or Virgil is so unlikely!

(Lady who so often rode in the same compartment with me
On the suburban train,
Did you ever become interested in me?
Did I put time to good use by looking at you?
What was the rhythm of our silence in the moving train?
What was the understanding that we never came to?
What life was there in this? What was this to life?)

No! All I want is freedom!
Love, glory, and wealth are prisons.
Lovely rooms? Nice furniture? Plush rugs?
Just let me out so I can be with myself.
I want to breathe the air in private.
My heart doesn’t throb collectively,
And I’m unable to feel in jointly held society.
I’m only I, born only as I am, full of nothing but me.
Where do I want to sleep? In the backyard.
Without any walls, just the great conversation,
I and the universe.
And what peace, what relief to fall asleep seeing not the ghost of my wardrobe
But the black and cool splendor of all the stars in concert,
The great and infinite abyss above
Placing its breezes and solaces on the flesh-covered skull that’s my face,
Where only the eyes—another sky—reveal the world of subjective being.

I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.

GOD

At times I’m the god I carry in myself,
And then I’m the god, the believer and the prayer
And the ivory image
In which this god is forgotten.

At times I’m no more than an atheist
Of this god I am when exalted.
I see in myself an entire sky,
And it’s only a vast and hollow sky.

3 June 1913

BY THE MOONLIGHT, IN THE DISTANCE

By the moonlight, in the distance,
A sailboat on the river
Sails peacefully by.
What does it reveal?

I don’t know, but my being
Feels suddenly strange,
And I dream without seeing
The dreams that I have.

What anguish engulfs me?
What love can’t I explain?
It’s the sailboat that passes
In the night that remains.