Classic Poem

I

What brought you to my frozen solitude,
overshadowed by the dying rack
of a grey twilight? . . . Behold the scene,
arid, sad, immeasurably sad.

If you come from sorrow, if your heart
on sorrow feeds, I bid you welcome to
the savage wilderness, where scarce a mirage
of that which was my youth remains behind.

But if perchance you come from less afar
and in your soul the taste of pleasure lingers,
better return to your tumultuous world.

If not, come and dip your Cyprian mantle
in the bittermost unfathomed sea
of grievous love or of exceeding tears.

II

Behold the scene: immensity below,
immensity, immensity above;
the high sierra bulking against the sky,
its base eroded with a dreadful cleft.

Gigantic boulders, torn by the earthquake
from the entrails of the living rock;
and throughout that brooding and adust
savannah, not a path, not a track.

Devastating incandescent air
where the serene imbedded eagles are
like nails being slowly driven home.

Awesomeness of silence, gloom, appal,
broken only, scarcely broken, by
the exultant gallop of the dappled deer.

III

In the accursed steppe, beneath the thrust
of the murderous sibilating blast,
you raise your delicate and sculptural form
like a relief imprinted on its verge.

The wind, labouring among the dunes,
sings with the voice of a celestial music
and imitates, beneath the drenching mist,
an infinite and solitary kiss.

In the fading light your eyes discharge
a dart dark with passion and distress
that fastens in my spirit and my flesh;

and, flagrant against the dying sun,
like a crest of plumes, immensely streaming,
your long black hair, your wild Indian's hair.

IV

The salt and infinitely bitter plain,
like a dead ocean's desiccated bed,
and, in the grey distance, by way of haven,
the precipitous crags, forsaken and stark.

On my rigid face the evening spreads,
like unguent, horrible obscurity,
and on your skin, burnt by the sun, the copper
and sepia of the wilderness's rocks.

And in the hollow where eternal shadow,
beneath the craggy peaks' enormous frown,
provides a bower and cavern for our love,

the lianas of your body twine
about the virile subjugating trunk
in a vast palpitation of our lives.

V

What morbid grievous infinity of distance!
What sullen and inexorable flatness!
Such horror hovers over all the scene
as on a place steeped in the blood of slaughter.

And the shadow that lengthens, lengthens, lengthens,
seems, with its tragic swathes, as though it were
the mighty spirit, full of bitterness,
of those doomed in hopelessness to die.

And there we tarry, with the overwhelming
sense of the affliction of all the passions,
beneath the weight of all the oblivions.

In a leaden sky the sun already
dead; and in our lacerated hearts
the desert and the desert and the desert!

VI

So farewell! . . . Yonder, austere and dark,
you retreat across the sun-scorched plain,
and all down your shoulders your ardent tresses,
verberating, like a malediction.

In my desolation what awaits me? . . .
— already I scarce can see your dragging skirt —
a drifting down of spring's young foliage
and endless longing for emerald past and gone.

The human cataclysm has destroyed
my heart and all expires that it holds . . .
perish memory and oblivion perish!

I glimpse you still and already forget your brow;
your back alone alas! I see, as that
is seen which flees eternity and recedes.