I went to visit the world.
How it smelt,
how it moved and hummed!
The blood stirred in my arm – svelte,
vein-blue and sluggish –
the blood stirred and a deluge of darkness
stained all the luminous rooms!
I am alone again now.
My sadness
is angular, guarded and grim.
*
I call you and I sense that you call me.
But I cannot hear if it is so at all.
There are chasms over which no bird
will fly. And silence like a wall.
There are phantasms that petrify the soul.
*
The scalpel and the metronome
on my father’s piano
kept silence between them
when I was a child.
Only now, given time,
have I started to hear
and to heed
their strange tales.
They trim time to a sliver.
*
Two.
There are two whom I ask,
to whom I give ear,
whose judgement I fear.
The pendulum swings through silence,
sand trickles through empty space –
ever nearer. Every instant.
I waver wanly between the two
half blindfolded,
now this way
now that way
inclining, declining.
Less and less is the leeway between them,
straighter and straighter is my spine,
shorter and shorter steps,
on and on
rarer and rarer the air –
until in the deep mirror of dream
they meet and meld
in a single gleam –
my heart and death.
Ash into air.
*
I sing in praise of the loser
for the winner is well lauded,
I kneel before the forlorn,
I bow before the beaten.
The world-quitter creates,
discovers selfdom in dreams;
the reality-bearer holds
strength and stature untold.
I sing in praise of the loser
and for the have-not’s joy;
I crown the outcast, pressing
my lips to that noble brow –
to the one who labours
lifelong with lack and loss,
both lightly and upright,
I am true to the core.
*
Rain, are you still rain
when you do not fall?
Dream, are you a dream
when no one sees you?
Whose are these steps
on this bare and mute
mist-buried mountain?
muses the listener.
The walker’s mind wanders.
Through the listener’s dream
seeps a drizzle of steps
like Yggdrasil leaves.
