I have dead ones, and I let them go

And was astonished to see them so comforted

So quickly at home in being dead, so at ease,

So different from their reputation. You alone, you come

Back; you brush against me, you move around, you want

To bump up against something so it makes a sound

And discloses you. O do not take from me what I

Slowly come to know. I am right; you err

When you, moved, have a homesickness

For any thing. We transfigure it:

It is not here, we reflect it out from within

Our being as soon as we recognize it.

 

I believed you to be much further along. It confuses me,

That it is you who comes and goes, you who

Has transfigured more than any other woman.

That we were startled when you died, no, that

Your strong death kept us in darkness,

Ripped the up-until-then away from the since-then,

That is our business; coming to terms with it

Will be our task that we pursue in all things.

But that you yourself were startled and even now

Are startled, where fright and shock no longer take place;

That you lose a piece of your eternity

And enter in here, friend, here

Where everything is not yet; that you, dispersed,

Dispersed for the first time in the universe and half,

That you do not grasp the course of unending natures

like you grasped every thing here;

that out of the cycle that already received you,

the silent heaviness of some disquiet

pulls you down to a time already counted out –

that awakens me at night often like a thief breaking in.

And if only I could say that you are just resting,

That you come out of generosity, out of an overflow,

Because you are so certain, so secure in yourself

That you wander around like a child, unafraid

Of places where someone might do you harm –

But no: you are pleading. This cuts me

To the bone and goes through me like a saw.

 

A reproach that you were to carry as a ghost

Would come after me, when I retire at night,

Into my lungs, into my gut,

Into the last poorest chamber of my heart,

But such a reproach would not be as terrible

As your pleading is. For what are you pleading?

 

Tell me, shall I travel? Have you left behind

Some thing somewhere that is struggling

And wants to return to you? Should I go to a country

That you did not see, though it was related to you

Like the other half of your soul?

 

I want to travel its rivers, want to

Go on land and ask about old customs.

I want to speak with the women in the doorways

And watch when they call their children.

I want to observe how they put on the landscape

Outside in the old task

Of the meadows and fields, I want to demand

To be taken to their king,

And want to bribe the priests

So they bring me to the strongest divine statue

And then leave and close the temple gates.

Then, once I know much, I just want to

Watch the animals, so that something

Of their movements slides over into my

Limbs, I want to have a short existence

In their eyes, so they hold me

And slowly let me be, calmly, without judgment.

I want to have the gardeners recite

Many flowers to me, that I may bring back

With me a remnant of the hundred odors

In the shards of their beautiful proper names.

And I want to buy fruits, fruits, in which

The land is once more, up to the sky.

 

For you understood this: the full fruits.

You laid them in bowls before you

And balanced their heaviness with colors.

And you saw the women like fruits

And saw the children so, driven inwardly

Into the forms of their being.

And you saw yourself as a fruit,

Took yourself out of your clothes, carried

Yourself before the mirror, let yourself in

Into your looking, which remained high above

And did not say: that is me; but: that is.

So much without curious desire was your looking,

And so possessionless, of such a true poverty,

That it no longer desired you yourself. Holy.

 

I want to keep you as you

Presented yourself to yourself in the mirror, deep within

and away from everything. Why do you come differently [now]?

What draws you back? Why do you want

To persuade me that in those amber beads

Around your neck is still some heaviness

Of that heaviness that is never there in the beyond

Of images at rest; why do you show me

In your behavior a foreboding;

What forces you to interpret the contours of

Your body like the lines of a hand,

So that I cannot see it anymore without [feeling a sense of] fate?

 

Come here into the candlelight. I am not afraid

To look at the dead. If they come,

They have a right to put themselves in our gaze, like other things.

 

Come here, let us be still for a while.

Look at this rose on my writing desk;

Is not the light around it exactly as timid

As around you; it too should perhaps not be here.

Outside in the garden, unmixed with me,

It should have stayed or it should have gone –

Now it remains like this. What is my consciousness to it?

 

Do not be startled if I now understand, ah,

Now it arises within me: I cannot do differently,

I must understand, even if I were to die from it.

To understand, that you are here. I understand.

Just as a blind man understands around a thing,

I feel your lot and know no name for it.

Let us lament together that someone

Took you out of your mirror. Can you still weep?

You cannot. The force and the welling of your tears

You have transformed into your mature gaze

And you undertook to transform every juice within you

Into a strong existence

That rises and circles in balance, blindly.

Then chance snatched you, your last chance

Snatched you back out of your furthest progess,

Back into a world where juices want [to be].

Did not snatch you whole, snatched only a piece at first

But as reality so increased around this piece

From day to day that it became heavy,

Then you needed yourself entire: then you went

And brought yourself out of the law in fragments,

Laboriously, because you needed yourself. Then

You carried yourself away and dug out of

The night-warm earth-kingdom of your heart

The seeds, still green, out of which your death should bud: yours,

Your own death for your own life.

And you ate them, the seeds of your death

Like all others, you ate its seeds

And had an aftertaste of sweetness within you

That you did not expect, you had sweet lips,

You who were already sweet inwardly in the senses.

 

O let us lament. Do you know how your blood

Came back from its incomparable route, reluctant and

Unwilling, when you retrieved it?

How it, confused, took up once again the small circulation

Of your body; how it, full of mistrust

And amazement, stepped into the placenta

And was suddenly tired from the long path back.

You drove it on, you prodded it on,

You dragged it to the fireplace, as

One drags a herd of animals to the sacrifice;

And you still wanted that it should be happy about it.

And you finally forced it: it was happy

And ran on and devoted itself. It seemed to you,

Because you were accustomed to other measures,

That it would only be a short while; but

Now you were in time, and time is long.

And time goes on, and time increases, and time

Is like the recurrence of a long sickness.

 

How short your life was, when you compare it

To those hours when you sat and

silently weighed the many forces of your much future

against the new child-sprout

that was also destiny. O woeful task.

O task above all power. You did

It day after day, you trudged to it

And pulled the beautiful weft out of the loom

And needed all your threads differently.

And in the end you still had courage for the festival.

 

For when it was done, you wanted to be rewarded,

Like children when they have drunk

Bittersweet tea that might make them healthy.

So you rewarded yourself: for you were too far from

Anyone else, as now too; no one would have

Been able to think up which reward would do you good.

You knew it. You sat up in the childbed,

And before you stood a mirror that gave you

Everything back. Now that was all you

And entirely before you, and inwardly there was only illusion,

The beautiful illusion of every woman who likes to

Change jewelry and combs her hair and changes.

 

Thus you died like women died in earlier times,

Old-fashioned you died in the warm house

The death of women in childbed, who want

To close themselves again and cannot do it,

Because that darkness that they bore with the child

Comes once again and pushes and enters.

 

Should we nevertheless have summoned

Mourners? Women who weep

For money and whom one can pay so that

They wail through the night when all is still.

Bring on the customs! We do not have enough

Customs. Everything goes away and is betrayed.

Thus you must come, dead, and here with me

Make up the mourning. Do you hear that I mourn?

I would like to throw my voice like a shawl

Over the shards of your death

And pull at it until it is in tatters,

And everything that I say would go so ragged

Into this voice and would freeze

If it all remained mourning. But now I also accuse:

Not the one who pulled you out of yourself

(I cannot discern him, he is like everyone),

But I accuse everyone in him: the man.

 

If somewhere a having-been-a-child arises

Deep within me that I do not yet know,

Perhaps the purest child-being of my childhood:

I do not want to know it. I want to form

An angel out of it without looking

And want to throw it into the first row of crying

Angels that reminisce God.

 

For this suffering has already lasted too long

And no one can bear it; it is too heavy for us,

The confused suffering of false love

Which, building on lapses of time as habit,

Names itself the right and grows out of the wrong.

Where is a man who has the right to ownership?

Who can own what does not preserve itself,

What from time to time simply catches

Itself and throws itself away again like a child a ball.

As little as the commander can hold on to

A statue of Nike on the fore-bow of a ship

When the secret lightness of being of the divinity

Suddenly lifts them away in the light sea-wind:

So little can one of us call the woman

Who does not see us anymore and who

Travels on the narrow strip of her existence

Like a miracle, without mishap:

If he could, occupation and pleasure would become guilt.

 

For this is guilt, if there is any guilt at all:

Not to increase the freedom of a beloved

With respect to every freedom that one summons up in oneself.

For we have, where we love, only this:

To let each other be; for that we hold to one another,

That is easy for us and does not need to be learned.

 

Are you still here? In what corner are you? –

You have known so much of all of this

And were able to do so much when you went

Around open to everything like a day just dawning.

The women suffer: to love means to be alone,

And artists sometimes sense in their work

That where they love they have to transfigure.

You began both; both is in that

Which now distorts a reputation, which now takes it away from you.

Ah, you were far from that reputation. You were

Inconspicuous; you had quietly taken in your beauty

As one pulls in a flag in the gray morning of a work day

And you wanted nothing but a long task, —

Which is not complete: for all that, not complete.

 

If you are still here, if in this darkness

There is still a place in which your spirit

Delicately resonates on the shallow soundwaves

That a voice, lonely in the night,

Raises in the currents of an upper room,

Then hear me: Help me. Look, thus we slide back,

Not knowing when, from our progress

Into something that we do not intend, in which

We entangle ourselves as in a dream

And in which we die without awakening.

No one is further along. To everyone who raised up

His blood into a work that lasts long

It can happen that he does not hold it up

And that it goes according to its weight, worthless.

For somewhere there is an old enmity

Between life and the great work.

That I may apprehend this work and say it, help me.

Like that which is farthest away sometimes helps: in me.

 

Do not come back. If you can bear it, be

Dead among the dead. The dead are occupied.

But help me in a way that does not distract you,

Like that which is farthest away sometimes helps: in me.