A.S.Kline
ã 2001
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A tree climbed there. O pure uprising!
And it was almost a girl, and she came out of
A god can do so. But tell me how a man
Raise no gravestone. Only let the rose
Praising, that’s it! As one ordered to
praise,
Only one who has raised the lyre
But you now, you whom I knew
like a flower
O this is the creature that has never been.
Will transformation. O long for the flame,
Be in front of all parting, as though it were
already
See the flowers, those, so true to the earth,
O fountain-mouth, you giver, you Mouth,
Oh come and go. You, almost a child still,
complete
Quiet friend of many distances, feel
Love-Song
How shall I hold my soul so it does not
touch on yours. How shall I lift it
over you to other things?
Ah, willingly I’d store it away
with some lost thing in the dark,
in some strange still place, that
does not tremble when your depths tremble.
But all that touches us, you and me,
takes us, together, like the stroke of a bow,
that draws one chord out of the two strings.
On what instrument are we strung?
And what artist has us in their hand?
O sweet song.
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
That was the strange mine of souls.
As secret ores of silver they passed
like veins through its darkness. Between the roots
blood welled, flowing onwards to Mankind,
and it looked as hard as Porphyry in the darkness.
Otherwise nothing was red.
There were cliffs
and straggling woods. Bridges over voids,
and that great grey blind lake,
that hung above its distant floor
like a rain-filled sky above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
one path, a pale strip, appeared,
passing by like a long bleached thing.
And down this path they came.
In front the slim man in the blue mantle,
mute and impatient, gazing before him.
His steps ate up the path in huge bites
without chewing: his hands hung,
clumsy and tight, from the falling folds,
and no longer aware of the weightless lyre,
grown into his left side,
like a rose-graft on an olive branch.
And his senses were as if divided:
while his sight ran ahead like a dog,
turned back, came and went again and again,
and waited at the next turn, positioned there –
his hearing was left behind like a scent.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if it reached
as far as the going of those other two,
who ought to be following this complete ascent.
Then once more it was only the repeated sound of his climb
and the breeze in his mantle behind him.
But he told himself that they were still coming:
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They were still coming, but they were two
fearfully light in their passage. If only he might
turn once more ( if looking back
were not the ruin of all his work,
that first had to be accomplished), then he must see them,
the quiet pair, mutely following him:
the god of errands and far messages,
the travelling-hood above his shining eyes,
the slender wand held out before his body,
the beating wings at his ankle joints;
and on his left hand, as entrusted: her.
The so-beloved, that out of one lyre
more grief came than from all grieving women:
so that a world of grief arose, in which
all things were there once more: forest and valley,
and road and village, field and stream and creature:
and that around this grief-world, just as
around the other earth, a sun
and a silent star-filled heaven turned,
a grief-heaven with distorted stars –
she was so-loved.
But she went at that god’s left hand,
her steps confined by the long grave-cloths,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was in herself, like a woman near term,
and did not think of the man, going on ahead,
or the path, climbing upwards towards life.
She was in herself. And her being-dead
filled her with abundance.
As a fruit with sweetness and darkness,
so she was full with her vast death,
that was so new, she comprehended nothing.
She was in a new virginity
and untouchable: her sex was closed
like a young flower at twilight,
and her hands had been weaned so far
from marriage that even the slight god’s
endlessly gentle touch, as he led,
hurt her like too great an intimacy.
She was no longer that blonde woman,
sometimes touched on in the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide bed’s scent and island,
and that man’s possession no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
given out like fallen rain,
shared out like a hundredfold supply.
She was already root.
And when suddenly
the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,
uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –
she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?’
But far off, darkly before the bright exit,
stood someone or other, whose features
were unrecognisable. Who stood and saw
how on the strip of path between meadows,
with mournful look, the god of messages
turned, silently, to follow the figure
already walking back by that same path,
her steps confined by the long grave-cloths,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Alcestis
Suddenly the messenger was there among them,
thrown into the simmer of the wedding-feast
like a new ingredient. The drinkers did not sense
the god’s secret entrance, holding his divinity
so close to himself, like a wet mantle,
and seeming one of them, this man or that,
as he passed through. But one of the guests
suddenly saw, in mid-speech, the young bridegroom,
at the table’s head, as if snatched up into the heights,
no longer reclining there, and, with his whole being,
mirroring, all over, a strangeness, that spoke to him, with terror.
And immediately after, as though a mixture cleared,
there was silence, only with a residue at the bottom
of clouded noise, and a precipitate
of fallen babbling, already offering the corruption
of musty laughter that has begun to turn.
Suddenly they were aware of the slender god,
and as he stood there, filled inwardly with his mission
and unyielding – they almost knew.
And yet, when it was spoken, it was greater
than all knowledge, none could grasp it.
Admetus has to die. When? This very hour.
But he broke through the shell of his terror
and stretched his hands from the fragments
outwards from them, to bargain with the god.
For years, for only one more year of youth,
for months, for weeks, for a few days,
oh, not days, for nights, for only one,
for one night, for just this one, for this.
The god refused, and then he cried out,
and cried out, and held nothing back, and cried
as his mother cried out in childbirth.
And she appeared near him, an old woman,
and also his father came, his old father
and both stood there, old, worn out, helpless,
by the howling man, who suddenly saw them,
as never before, so close, broke off, swallowed, said:
‘Father,
does it matter to you then what’s left, the dregs,
that will almost stop you from cramming your food?
Come: pour them away. And you, you, old woman,
Mother,
what are you still doing here: you’ve given birth?’
And held them both like sacrificial beasts
in his single grasp. All at once he loosed them
and thrust the old people away, filled with an idea,
gleaming, breathing hard, calling: ‘Creon! Creon!’
And nothing but that: and nothing but that name.
Yet in his face stood the other name,
he could not say, namelessly expected,
as he held it out, glowing, to his young friend,
that beloved friend, through the table’s confusion.
‘These old ones (it stood there), you see, are no ransom,
they are used up, and done for, and almost worthless,
but you, you, in all your beauty’ –
But then he no longer saw his friend.
He hung back, and that which came, was her,
a little smaller almost than he knew her,
and slight, and sorrowful, in her bleached wedding-dress.
All the others are only her narrow path
down which she comes, and comes – ( soon she’ll be
there in his arms, that have opened in pain)
But as he waits, she speaks: not to him.
She speaks to the god, and the god listens,
and all hear, as it were, within the god:
‘No other can be a substitute for him. I am.
I am his ransom. For no one else is finished,
as I am. What remains to me then of that
which I was, here? That is it, yes, that I’m dying.
Didn’t she tell you, Artemis, when she commanded this,
that the bed, that one which waits inside,
belongs to the other world below? I’m really taking leave.
Parting upon parting.
No one who dies takes more. I truly depart,
so that all this, buried beneath him
who is now my husband, melts and dissolves itself –
So take me there: I die indeed for him.
And as the wind changes, over the open sea,
so the god approached as if she were almost one of the dead,
and he was all at once far from her husband,
to whom, concealed in a slight gesture,
he threw the hundred lives of Earth.
He plunged, staggering, towards the two,
and grasped at them as if in dream. They were already
going towards the entrance, into which the women
crowded, sobbing. Once more he still saw
the girl’s face, that turned towards him
with a smile, bright as hope,
that was almost a promise: fulfilled,
to come back up from the depths of Death
to him, the Living –
At that, indeed, he threw
his hands over his face, as he knelt there,
so as to see nothing more than that smile.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his undiscovered head
in which the apples of the eyes ripen. Yet
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his seeing, now constrained,
remains and shines. Otherwise the curve
of the breast could not dazzle you, nor could a smile
pass through the quiet axis of the loins
to that centre where procreation swelled.
Otherwise this stone would be disfigured, and cut short,
under the shoulders’ transparent fall,
and would not glimmer so, like a predator’s pelt:
and would not flare out from all its edges
like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must transmute your life.
Buddha in Glory
Kernel of all kernels, heart of all hearts,
almond, that encloses itself and sweetens –
this universe as far as every star
is your ripening flesh: all hail.
Behold, you feel how nothing more clings to you:
your shell is in the unending,
and there the heavy juice halts and yearns.
And from beyond a brightness helps it,
for all above become your Suns,
full and glowing, turning round you.
But in you is already begun
what will outlast the Suns.
Requiem for a Friend
(Paula Modersohn-Becker 1876-1907)
I have dead ones, and I have let them go,
and was astonished to see them so peaceful,
so quickly at home in being dead, so just,
so other than their reputation. Only you, you turn
back: you brush against me, and go by, you try
to knock against something, so that it resounds
and betrays you. O don’t take from me what I
am slowly learning. I’m sure you err
when you deign to be homesick at all
for any Thing. We change them round:
they are not present, we reflect them here
out of our being, as soon as we see them.
I thought you were much further on. It disturbs me
that you especially err and return, who have
changed more than any other woman.
That we were frightened when you died, no, that
your harsh death broke in on us darkly,
tearing the until-then from the since-that:
it concerns us: that it become a unique order
is the task we must always be about.
But that even you were frightened, and now too
are in terror, where terror is no longer valid:
that you lose a little of your eternity, my friend,
and that you appear here, where nothing
yet is: that you, scattered for the first time,
scattered and split in the universe,
that you did not grasp the rise of events,
as here you grasped every Thing:
that from the cycle that has already received you
the silent gravity of some unrest
pulls you down to measured time –
this often wakes me at night like a thief breaking in.
And if only I might say that you deign to come
out of magnanimity, out of over-fullness,
because so certain, so within yourself,
that you wander about like a child, not anxious
in the face of anything one might do –
but no: you are asking. This enters so
into my bones, and cuts like a saw.
A reproach, which you might offer me, as a ghost,
impose on me, when I withdraw at night,
into my lungs, into the innards,
into the last poor chamber of my heart –