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.