Short Poems

To a lady glimpsed in her carriage:
Seen, and yet not seen —
that such a one could be
so longed for —
today I spend the whole day
hopelessly gazing

One can't say it is impossible. At some end of the earth, unknown to me, surely in a basement in a foggy city, a thin twenty-five-year-old just like me, his hair blond, eyes gray, talks in a Scandinavian language about the principle of revolutionary action. Is it madness or sentimentalism? Even if it were vomit in the winter of 1947, who would now believe it was someone else's business? Possibly, like Modigliani's men, he's cocking his head on a thin neck, staring. It's not definite what his eyes are looking at. It's no longer clear. No longer definite. No longer clear, the universe.

There is an eye in the stone. There is an eye closed with melancholy and tedium.
He passes by my door in a black robe. Winter emperor, my lonely emperor! With your white forehead reflecting the shadows of civilizations, you walk to the graveyard of Europe. The sun shining on your back, your self-punishment is painful.

The afternoon arrives suddenly. He, as a person, is pushed into the bottom of the chair. His arms hanging slack, the world begins to darken. The world's sufferings drive him into his single being. The world's sorrows gouge out his eyes. Like an empty socket, the door, opened, leads directly into the past, it seems to him.

The fingers begin to droop. On the gray musical scale unearthed here.
Hold your breath. Talk in voiceless sounds ... love is a twilight symbol caused by a dissonance of genitals and the dead. On rainy days she is beautiful.

The bandaged rain turned and left. After making a round of the sleepless city.
That autumn, I went to a recital. A concert hall shut in by dry doors. A cold, cruel pianist seated on a hard chair. There the dark dream rejected by sleep silently handed over all weapons to you. You may arm yourself. Love, love your life.
Outside, the rain smelling of fresh gauze turned another corner to the harbor, from the harbor at twilight to the dark sea, to the world of illusion without stars.

He was afraid of naked thought. Beautiful things never fail to kill. That's what he used to say.
It's no longer a matter of seeing with the eyes. Nor trying to draw with the hands, either. In broad daylight, in this city, in the autumn of 1947, I witnessed: the logical proof of death which someone incises in golden calligraphy on a breast of white wax.
Nothing is sad, but somehow he stops, eyes filled with tears. And without saying a word, he is absently looking in my direction.

People all over the world want proof of death. But no one has ever witnessed death. In the end, people may be a mere illusion, and reality the greatest common divisor of such things. Instead of people, objects begin to ask questions. About life. About its existence. Even if a chair questions, I must be afraid. Reality may be the least common multiple of such things. Incidentally, how can a man unable to feel melancholy about the fate of people stake his life on this world of disturbances? On occasion geniuses have appeared, only to make nothingness more precise.

A landscape he saw in a German etching lies before him. It looks like a bird's-eye view of an ancient city, dusk turning to night, or, he thought, like a realistic picture depicting a modern precipice, midnight being led to daybreak.
The man — that is, he about whom I began to speak — killed his father when he was young. That same autumn, his mother, beautifully, went mad.

7. Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?
8. It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?
9. The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.
10. If he cut off, and shut up, or gather together, then who can hinder him?