Gary Whittington could not forget the sense of complete absorption that literary translation afforded him during his time at the University of Iowa. From time to time during his career as a lawyer, Whittington re-translated works he read in translation.

 

This was not intended as an implied criticism of other translators. Rilke has been wonderfully translated. It is just that translation, an intrinsically imperfect art, requires tradeoffs. Multiple supportable translations can coexist and reveal different approaches. In this translation, I allowed my choices to be informed by my own devotional experiences. Perhaps, in a few cases, I found something that others missed. In the case of The Book of Hours, I just got started and could not seem to find anything to do that I found more engaging. 

 

This translation is from the middle of the three “books” included in The Book of Hours, “Das Buch von der Pilgerschaft” in German.

​

The Book of Pilgrimage

​

The force of the storm is not a shock to you:
you watched it grow.
The trees were fleeing and their flight
made the avenues stride along with them.
You know you are walking to
the one they flee from,
and your senses sing him into being
as you stand at the window.

​

The weeks of the summer stood still,
the blood of the trees rose;
now you feel it wants to fall back down
into him that accomplishes all.
You thought you understood power,
but you grasped a fruit
and now you know again it is mystery.
Again you are a guest.

​

The summer was like your house
everything known, in its place and still--
now you must enter your heart and walk out
as though entering a steppe.
The great loneliness begins,
the days go numb,
the wind strips the world from your senses
like withered leaves.

 

You have the sky.
It watches through the empty branches.
Now be the earth and evensong
and the ground under its passing.
Be humble, a thing
that ripened into being
so He, from whom knowledge came
can feel you in his grasp.

​

I pray again to you, most High
again through the wind you hear me
because my never spoken words
roar with power from my depths.

​

I was scattered and those against me
passed around pieces of my being.
O God, all laughter was at me
all drunkards drank away a part of me.

​

I assembled myself in courtyards
from garbage and broken glass,
with half my mouth I stammered at you,
you, made eternal by symmetry.
How I raised my half hands to you
begging you without words
to let me find again the eyes
that looked upon you once.

​

I was a burned-out house--
only murderers come in and sleep now and then
before the punishment that hungers for them
drives them out into the fields.

​

I was like a city on the sea
infested by a plague
that made children bear it in their hands
like a heavy corpse.

 

I knew myself as a stranger.
All I knew about him was that
he made my young mother sick
as she carried me . . .

 

Now I have constructed myself again
from the pieces of my shame
and I yearn to be bound together
for some single intelligence
to look over me, to see the thing I am--
for the great hands of your heart--
(if they would just reach for me).
I have counted out the pieces of myself, my God.
They are yours to waste.

 

I am the still the one who knelt
before you in a monk’s robes:
the lowly Levite serving at worship
whom you filled, who invented you.
The voice of a quiet cell
that the world blows by--
and you are still the wave
that washes over all things.

​

There is no more to it. Only a sea
from which lands sometimes rise.
There is no more to it than silence
from the beautiful angels and their strings,
and from the one who hides in silence
comes the unbearable radiance
so all things must bow.

​

Are you the All? Am I apart then
as I surrender or rebel?
Does that not make me everyone?
Am I not all that are when I weep,
and, you, who hears, the one apart?

​

Do you hear something next to me?
Are there not voices besides my own?
Is it a storm? I too am a storm
and my forests beckon to you.

 

Is there some faint, hoarse song
that interrupts my plea to you?
Listen to mine, I am such a song
lonely and unheard.

​

I am still the one afraid
who kept on asking who you are.
After every sundown
I am wounded and abandoned,
pale, detached from all
scorner of every flock
and all things stand before me
like cloisters that shut me in.
Then is when I need you, who consecrates:
you kind neighbor for any want
you gentle second with my suffering
you God, I need you then like bread.
Maybe you do not know what
the nights of the sleepless are like
they are all like those awaiting trial
old man, young woman, child
all are driven up like the condemned
surrounded by dark shapes
and their white hands tremble
woven into a savage life like dogs
into the tapestry of a hunt.
The past is still before us
and in the future lie corpses.
A man in an overcoat taps at the door
but neither the eye nor the ear
makes out a sign of morning.
The rooster will not crow just yet.
The night is a like a great manor
where aching hands tear in fear
openings into walls so they can pass
into hallways that are endless.
There is no gate out.

 

And so, my God, is every night.
There are always some who wake up
and walk and walk and cannot find you.
Do you hear them moving through the darkness
with the footfalls of the blind?
Do you hear them praying
on the winding stairway down?
Do you hear when they fall onto the black stones?
You must hear them weeping. They are weeping.

 

They are walking past my door
so I am searching for you. I can almost make them out.
Who else can I call on, if not on the one
who is dark, more night than night itself.
The only One who sits awake without a lamp
and has no fear, the One of depths that light
has never defiled. I know about him,
because he breaks from the earth with trees.
He rises softly from the soil
like a scent to my face
when I bow down.

 

You Timeless One, you revealed yourself to me.
I love you like a dear son
who ran away as a child
when fate called him to a throne.
The countries of the world are valleys beneath it.
Like an old man I stayed back
no longer understanding the great man
his son became, nor the new things
to which that the will of his child has turned.
Sometimes I shudder to think of your great fortune
carried abroad aboard so many ships
and I wish sometimes you would come back into me
into the darkness that nourished you to greatness.
Sometimes I fear you no longer exist
when I get very lost in time.
Then I read about you: the Evangelist
writes everywhere of your timelessness.
I am the father, but the son is more,
is all the father was. And what the father
did not become grows great in him.
He is the future and the return.
He is the warmth of being held and the sea.

 

My prayers are not blasphemous to you:
I looked it up in old books:
we are kin in a thousand ways.

​

I want to give you love. This love and this other. . .

 

Does anyone love a father? Doesn’t everyone harden
his face and leave, as you did me?
Doesn’t everyone leave his empty, helpless hands?
Don’t we lay his shriveled words gently
within the pages of books we seldom read?
Do we not flow away from his heart
as from a ridge, into suffering and desire?
Is the father then that which was;
years gone by, a stranger now
with gestures no one uses, old-fashioned clothes
pale hands and dyed hair?
And even if he was once a hero in his time
he is the leaf that falls when we grow.

 

And to us his caring is a nightmare
and his voice is like a stone.
We may wish to submit to what he says,
but we hear half his words.
The great drama between him and us
is far too loud. We do not understand each other,
we see only shapes of his mouth.
The syllables fall from it and are lost.
So we are not just far from him but even farther.
Love does weave us together, but at a distance,
so only when he must die on this  planet
do we even notice he lived on it.

​

That is who the Father is to us.
And I am supposed to call you my Father?
That would break us apart in a thousand ways.
You are my son. I will recognize you
as one does a beloved only child
even after he becomes a man, an old man.

​

Snuff out my eyes and I can see you,
plug my ears and I can hear you,
without feet I can walk to you
without a mouth I still can plead with you.
Break off my arms and I will hold you
with my heart as with a hand.
Press against my heart until it stops and my brain will beat.
If you hurl a firebrand into my brain
then I will carry you in my blood.

 

And my soul stands before you like a woman
of the line of Naomi, or of Ruth
wandering by day among your piled sheaves
like a girl for the lowest tasks.
But in the evening she stands in the stream
and bathes and puts on her best clothes
and comes to you, when quiet surrounds you
and uncovers herself at your feet.
And if you question her at midnight she says
simply: I am Ruth, the maiden.
Cover this your maiden with your wing.
You are the heir . . .

 

And then my soul sleeps until daylight
against your feet, warmed by your blood,
and is like a woman to you, like a Ruth.

 

You are the heir.
Sons are the heirs
for fathers die.
Sons stand and bloom.
You are the heir.

 

And you inherit the green
of faded gardens and the still blue
of fallen skies.
Dew of a thousand mornings
the many summers spoken by suns
and many springs that shone and rang
like letters from a young woman.
You inherit the autumns that lie
like gorgeous vestments in poets’ memory
and all winters, like deserted lands,
seem to rest softly against you.
You inherit Venice, Kazan, and Rome,
Florence will be yours, Pisa’s cathedral,
the Troiska convent, the monastery
under the gardens of Kiev, a maze
of tunnels, full of darkness and devotion.
Moscow with bells that ring like memories.
Yours the sounds of woodwinds, brass, and strings
and that song, if it comes from deep enough
will shine from you as from a gemstone.

 

It is only for you that poets shut themselves inside,
fill themselves with rich, dizzying imagery,
and go out to compare and grow old,
for their whole lives so alone . . .
And painters paint their pictures only so you
can take back nature from them unchanged
though you made it to pass away.
Everything becomes eternal.
Look, the Feminine in the Mona Lisa
has aged for so long like wine
it never has to be a woman again,
the new that comes brings no woman
who adds more to it.
Those who create are like you.
They want eternity. They say: Stone,
be eternal. And that means to be of you!

 

Those who love gather for you too:
They are poets for one short hour
their kisses coax smiles from indifferent mouths
as though to make them more beautiful.
They bring desire and accustom others
to pain that they themselves call forth.
With their laughter comes suffering,
longings that sleep and awaken
and break from a stranger’s breast as sobs.

 

They add to the pile of riddles and they die
as animals die, not knowing what just happened
but maybe they will have grandchildren
in whom their lives, plucked green, can ripen
and they can pass on to you that love they gave themselves
blindly, as though they were asleep.

 

The things overflow and flow to you.
And as a fountain’s high basin always overflows
and streams down to the lowest pool
as though in locks of hair untied and shaken free,
so fullness flows into your valleys
when things and thoughts spill out.

 

I am just one of your lesser ones
who looks out at life from a cell
at people more remote than things
and does not dare to try
to understand what comes to pass.
But you still want me before your countenance
as your eyes rise from its darkness
so do not think me arrogant
if I say this: No one lives his life.
People are coincidence, voices, pieces,
routines, fears, many small joys,
disguised as children, wrapped tight--
that come of age as masks on speechless faces

 

I often think there must be vaults
where these many lives have been placed
like suits of armor, or litters, or cradles
where no real person has ever been
and like garments that cannot stand
when empty, they fall in heaps
against arched walls of rock.

 

And when every evening I go out farther
from my garden, where I have grown tired
I know that then all paths lead
to the armory of what has not been lived.
There is no tree there, as though the land
has just lain down,
and the walls are hung around me
like a prison of seven rings.
and their gates are strengthened with iron
to resist all who would leave
and their grating is made of human hands.

 

But even though everyone fights their way
out of the self, as from a prison that hates and holds them,
I feel a great miracle in the world:
that all life is lived.

 

Who lives it then? Is it all things,
silently at rest in evenings
like unplayed songs within a harp?
Is it the winds that blow off the water,
the branches waving at each other,
the flowers weaving their fragrances,
the long avenues as they age with us?
Is it the warm animals as they move,
the birds that suddenly take flight?

 

Who lives it then? Is it you, God, living Life itself?

 

You are the old one whose hair
is singed and covered with soot
the huge one with plain features
holding a hammer in his hand.
You are the blacksmith, pounding
the tune of the years
never leaving his anvil.

 

You are the one who never rests on Sundays
the one consumed by work
who could die over a sword
never made smooth or finished to its shine.
And when all are lazy and drunk
among the saws and the mills
we hear your hammer striking
every bell in the city.

 

You have come of age, a master
but no one saw you when you were learning
one who came from somewhere, a stranger.
Rumors of you go around,
blurted out and whispered.

 

The rumors guess about you
and the doubts blot you out.
The indolent and the dreamers
mistrust the heat that glows in them
and want the hills to bleed
before then they will not believe.

 

But you lower your face.

 

You could cut open the veins of the hills
as a sign of your great judgment
but you do not care who is heathen.
You will not battle with every stratagem
or seek out the love of light
but you do not care who is Christian.

 

Those who question do not concern you.
Your gentle gaze falls
on those with burdens.

Those who seek you test you.
And those who find you tie you
to images and gestures.

 

But I would grasp you
as the world grasps you,
and by growing into fullness
bring into fullness
your kingdom.

​

I want no trinket from you
as proof
that you exist.
I know the difference
between you
and time.

 

Perform no miracles for my sake.
but give your laws justly
so that from generation to generation
we see them more clearly.

 

When something falls from my window
(even the very smallest thing)
how the law of gravity plunges
powerful as the wind from the sea
pulling down on every ball and berry
and bears it to the heart of the world.

 

A goodness that is ready to take flight
watches over all things:
things like stones and blossoms
and every small child as it sleeps.
Only we in our arrogance, press
out of what holds together
into the empty space of freedom
instead of letting go of cleverness
so that we may rise like trees.
We do not take the broad path,
quiet and willing. We find instead
ways to tie ourselves in knots
and shut ourselves from that region
nameless and alone.

 

For we must start over like children
and learn of things. Because
God attached them to our hearts,
they never left us.

 

First, we must master falling again:
feeling our heaviness, resting calmly
within it, before all the birds
do likewise, and take flight.

 

(Because even the angels have ceased flying.
The seraphim are like heavy birds
that sit around in the debris birds leave,
thinking, like worried penguins . . .)

 

You favor humility. Silent faces
bent down, understanding you.
Like this the young poets walk
on deserted avenues, like this
the farmers stand around a corpse
when a child is lost to death
and whatever happens is the same power
greater than great, taking precedence.

 

The neighbor and the hour disturb
the one who first perceives you,
he walks out, bent down to see your tracks, as though
weighed down by some burden and the years.
Only later when he draws close to nature
does he sense the vastness and feel the winds
hear the meadows whispering you,
see you, the song of the stars.
Then he can no longer unlearn of you
because all is nothing but your garment.

 

To him you are new and near and good
and wonderful like a journey
taken on a quiet ship that floats
lightly on a great river.
The shore is far off, windswept and flat
abandoned to very great skies
placed beneath ancient forests.
The little towns that grow close
move into the distance like the ringing of bells
and like a yesterday or a today
and like all the things we once saw.
But along the course of this stream
more towns keep rising up
as though carried by beating wings
to meet the celebration as it passes.

 

And sometimes the ship veers to shore
in lonely places, apart from the other villages and towns,
that wait for something from the waves
for the one who has no home . . .
and for ones like these small wagons wait
(each hitched to three horses)
they rush away breathless
on a path that that disappears.

 

In this village stands the last house
lonely, at the end of the world.

​

The roads that do not reach this little village
move off into the night.
This little village is only a passage
between two worlds, foreboding, frightening
a path to building, but with no footbridge.

 

Those who set out wander long
and maybe many die on the road.

 

Sometimes a man who sits at dinner stands up
and goes out and walks and walks and walks
Because of a church somewhere to the east.

 

And his children bless him, as though he were dead.

And another, who dies in his house
stays alive in it, in the table and glasses
so his children go out into the world
drawn to that church, which he forgot.

 

Madness is a night watchman,
because he never sleeps.
He stays on his feet, laughing, at every hour,
looking for a name to give the night,
and he does name it: seven, twenty-eight, ten . . .

 

And he carries a triangle in his hand
and because his hands shake, it hits against
the edge of the horn, that he cannot blow
and he sings the song he brings to all homes.

 

The children have a good night
and hear in their dreams that madness keeps watch.
The dogs cower from the ringing,
pace all around the houses
and tremble, because he has passed by
and they dread his return.

 

Do you know about those holy ones, Lord?
they filled the cells of cloisters
too close to laughter and to bawling
so that they dug themselves into holes
deep in the earth.

 

The light of each of them
consumed the air within his hole.
He forgot his age and his own face
and lived like a house without windows
and being dead, could not die again.

 

They seldom read; they pushed it all aside
as though frost had crept into every book
and meaning hung from each word
like the cowls draped over their bones.
They spoke no longer to each other when they brushed
past each other in the dark halls.
They let their long hair hang down.
No one knew if the monk in the next cell
had died in his bed.
In a circular room
where silver lamps burned balsam
the companions got together sometimes
standing before  golden doors as they once had golden gardens
and looked into their dream, full of mistrust
and rustled softly with their long beards.

 

Their lives seemed to last a thousand years
without the divisions of night and brightness;
they went back into their mothers’ wombs
as though waves had rolled them from their feet
and pulled them backwards.
They sat in cramped circles like embryos
with huge heads and tiny hands
and ate nothing, as though nourished
by that dark earth that closed in on them.

​

Now one shows to them the thousand pilgrims
boiling up into the cloister from the cities and the steppes.
For three centuries they have lain there
and their corpses are incorruptible.
Like soot from a lamp, thickening darkness coats
their long shapes where they lie stored
preserved in secret beneath their shrouds
and the peaks made by folded hands
are frozen in place on top of their chests.

 

You great and ancient lord of the sublime:
did it slip your mind to send them their deaths,
these who dug down into their own graves,
because they dove deep into the earth?
Are these who measure themselves against the dead
the ones who best model the imperishable?
Is this the great life of your body
that should last beyond the death of time?

 

Do they still fit into your plans?
If you could get imperishable vessels
would you who are measureless
finally measure out your blood
and fill them with it?

 

You are the future, the vast, red dawn
over the plains of eternity.
You are the crow of the rooster after the night of time,
the dew, the mass at morning, the maiden,
the stranger, the mother, and death.

 

You are the single shape that keeps
poking up from destiny and changing,
not celebrated, not complained about,
undescribed, like a virgin forest.

 

You are the deep essence of things
that never speaks the final word of what it is
and reveals itself always as the other:
to the ship as the coast, and to the land, as a ship.

 

Images of wounds are cloistered within you,
in thirty-two old cathedrals
and in fifty churches whose walls were made
by stacking opal and amber.
Within each courtyard, on each thing
lies one stanza of the sound of you
and the mighty gate begins to move.
In long buildings the nuns live
seven hundred and ten black sisters.
Sometimes one comes to the springs
another stands as though cocooned
and another’s slender figure
moves on the quiet avenue, in the light of sunset.

 

But most of them one never sees;
they stay in the houses of silence
like melodies that no one can play
trapped in the lungs of a sick violin. . .

 

And around the churches, in rings
surrounded by languishing jasmines
are the graveyards. With the quiet voices
of stones they speak about the world.
The world that is no more
though once it surged against the cloisters,
clothed in the stuff of ordinary days
cunning and desire in equal measure.

 

It is gone now: because you are.

 

Still, it flows like a play of light
across the indifferent year;
But you, the evening, and the poets look down
and under your faces
the things in darkness are revealed.

 

The world’s kings are old
and will have no heirs.
The sons of diseased royalty
die in childhood; they hand over
their pale daughters to the violent.

 

The mob grinds up their crowns for money.
The modern lord of the world
reaches as fire into machines,
that do his will in grudging service,
in them there is no happiness.

 

The ore is homesick.
It wants to leave the coins and wheels
that teach it to live a small life.
And from factories and cash registers
it will return into the veins
of the fractured mountains
and they will close over it.

 

All will be great again, and full of power.
The countryside unspoiled, the waters rippling,
the trees gigantic, the walls very low;
and in the valleys, a people strong and diverse:
herdsmen and workers in fields.

 

And no churches where God is seized
like a refugee and wailed over,
a trapped and wounded beast.
The houses opened wide to all who knock
and a feeling of limitless giving
in all dealings, and in you and me.

 

No waiting for the world to come or looking over there,
only a yearning for a death we do not curse,
and to do what we can to serve on earth
until our hands are fresh and new no longer.

 

And you too will be great. Greater than one
who must now start to live, can say.
Much stranger and more noble
and much older than an old man.

 

We will sense you as a presence,
as from the scent of a nearby garden;
We will love you like the sick love their favorite things,
full of uncertainty and tenderness.

 

There will be no praying by crowds.
You are not found in clubs;
whoever feels you and rejoices in you
will be like the only one on earth:
one both an outcast and a unifier,
one both gathered in, but at the same time poured out,
one who smiles and is half exhausted with weeping,
small as a house, and powerful as an empire.

 

There will be no rest in the houses. Maybe
someone will die and must be carried away,
or maybe someone will hear a secret call
hang a medal on his neck, take up
his staff, and walk into the unknown
to ask the way to where he knows you wait.

 

The roads are never empty
for those who seek you like a rose
that blooms once a thousand years.
Many are obscure people, nearly nameless;
they are weary when they reach you.

 

I have seen their procession
and now believe that the wind
must bear them forward, spilling from their cloaks,
and dying when they lay themselves to rest--
so vast the plain of their passage.

 

I would like to come to you like that:
gathering alms at strange thresholds
to feed my hunger. If many paths confused me
I would seek out the oldest ones,
fall in beside the small old men
and as they walked, I would see as in a dream
their knees washed over by the waves of their beards
like islands of bare stone.

 

We overtook men who were blind
and used their servant boys to see
and weary women drinking from the stream
and many women awaiting childbirth.
And all of them were so strangely close to me,
as though the men saw in me a kinship in the blood
and the women saw a friend.
Even the dogs I saw came up to me.

 

You God, I want to be many pilgrims
to approach you as a long procession
and to be a big part of you:
you garden with living pathways.
If I walk as I am, alone
who is there to notice? Who sees me coming to you?
Who is pulled along with me? Who is stirred,
and who is converted to you?

 

They keep laughing., as though
Nothing has happened. It is fine with me
to keep on going as I am, and that way
none of the laughing ones can see me.

 

By day you are the rumors
that flow whispering through the crowd;
the silence that closes on itself
after the bells toll the hours.

 

The more the day’s gestures weaken
as it bends down toward the night
the more you are, my God, and your kingdom
rises like smoke from every rooftop.

 

The pilgrim’s morning. At the tolling
of the first hour, the people lift themselves
from the hard pallets where they collapsed
as though poisoned. People
gaunt, blessing the morning
as the early sun burns down on them:

 

Bearded men who bow down,
grave-faced children who rise from the furs
in cloaks, weighed down by silence,
the brown women from Tiflis and Tashkent.
Christians whose gestures come from Islam
are at the spring, reaching their hands
like shallow bowls, like objects, into the flow
that comes into them like a soul.

 

They bend their faces down and drink
open their garments with their left hands
and hold the water to their breasts
as though it were a cool and sobbing face
speaking of the suffering on earth.

 

And this suffering stands around in rings
with bags under their eyes; and you do not know
who they are or were. Servants or farmers,
Maybe merchants who once prospered,
maybe monks whose tepid vows failed them
thieves furtive in fear of trial 
girls who squat in fear and blurt things out
and the lost who wander in a forest of madness.

 

All like princes in deep sadness
for the excess lost to them.
All wise, like those who live through much,
chosen, those who were in the desert
nursed by a strange beast sent by God,
lonely those who crossed plains in darkness
with many different winds on their cheeks,
made fearful by a longing that captured them
and yet raised them up, such a miracle.
Released from the everyday, stuck into
a space of organ music and choirsong,
and kneeling as though frozen in the act of standing,
banners with images woven into them
long hidden away, folded up together.

 

Now they are slowly hung up once more.

 

And some stand and look towards the house
where the sick pilgrims live;
for just then a monk comes out and turns
his hair limp and his cassock rumpled
his shadowed face swollen with a sickly blue
and very darkened by his demons.

 

He bowed as though he broke himself in two
and threw the halves to the ground
a scream seemed to drool from his mouth
and his arms flailed.

 

And slowly his fall came upon him and passed.

 

He thought he heard wings and flew up again,
and the feeling of lightness seduced him.
He imagined he had become a bird.
He hung between his thin arms
half-collapsed, a  marionette,
and believed he had great wings
and that he had been soaring over the world
for a long time, like a flat valley.
In disbelief he felt his sudden plunge
down onto strange places
and the green sea flats of his torment.
And he twisted himself into a narrow fish and swam
through deep, silver-gray water
saw the tortured hanging from branches of coral
and the mermaid’s hair
that rustled through the water like a comb.
And he came to the land and was the groom
of a dead bride so that no maiden
(it was explained to him) would set foot
unmarried on the meadows of Paradise.
He walked behind her, measuring his steps
and danced around her, she in the middle
with her arms wrapped around him.
Then he caught a sound, as though a third shape
had stepped quietly into the game,
and did believe in the dance.
And then he saw it: now you must pray
for this is the one to whom the prophets
have lent themselves, like a great crown.
We hold the one we implore every day,
we gather him in, the one once proclaimed
and turn home with the tools that quiet us,
in long rows like the notes of songs.
And he bowed low, grasping himself.

 

But the old one, as though asleep
saw nothing, although his eye was open.

 

And he bowed down to such great depths
that a shudder passed through his limbs.
Still the old one sensed nothing.

 

He grabbed the sick monk by the hair
and beat him like a robe against a tree.
But the old one stood and barely noticed.

 

Then he took up the sick monk and held him
in his hands like a headsman’s sword
raising him up again and again
scoring the walls
finally driving him into the ground in rage.
But the old one vaguely looked on.

 

Then the monk ripped off his robe
like the skin of a fruit and knelt
holding it out to the old one.

 

And look, he came. Came as to a child
and said softly: Do you know who I am now?
and he did know
and rested himself gently upon the ancient one
like a violin beneath a chin.

 

Already the red barberries ripen over
mounds of soil, their branches breathing
weakly. The summer is passing, whoever
is not yet rich, possessing the self
will wait forever.

 

Whoever cannot close his eyes
without seeing a full measure of faces
within himself, ring from the darkness
where they waited for night to begin--
he is an old man and has already passed away.

 

Nothing else comes to meet him
no more days draw near to him
all that happens lies to him
even you, my God.
You are like a stone
that pulls him down every day
into the abyss.

 

You must not be afraid, God.
They say mine of everything that is patient.
They are like wind brushing against a branch
that says: my tree.

 

They barely notice
how all that their hands grasp glows
and burns them even if
they hold it by the very edge.
They say mine, like someone
dropping the name of his friend the prince
who is very great and far away.

 

They say mine of strange walls
and know nothing about the lord
in whose dominion is their home.
They say mine and claim to own
everything that closes at their approach,
like a obvious charlatan taking credit
for the sun or for a lightning strike.
So they say: my life, my wife
my dog, my child, knowing well

 

That all of it: life, woman, dog and child
are strange shapes in darkness
that they bump against with outstretched hands.

 

Certainty, admittedly, is only for the great ones
who seek to have eyes. The others
want to hear nothing, to wander in poverty
through an incoherent nothingness
pushed out of what they have,
unrecognized by what they own,
their women no more theirs
than the strange life
that blooms for them all.

 

Do not lose your balance, God.
Even one who loves you
and recognizes your face in darkness
when your breath moves the flame of a candle
does not possess you.
And when someone grasps you in the night
and you must be pulled into his prayer
still you are just the guest
who must always move along.

 

Who can hold you, God? You are of yourself
untouched by the hand of a possessor
as a green wine growing sweeter
belongs only to itself.

 

In the deep nights I dug for you, the treasure.
I have seen abundance overflowing,
but it is worthless, a cheap placeholder
for your beauty yet to come.

 

Digging bloodied my hands,
I lift them up, open to the wind,
so they can grow branches like a tree.
I use them to suck you out of space
as though you broke yourself into pieces there,
gesticulating wildly,
and are falling now, a planet’s dust
from distant stars, back to the Earth
softly as spring rain.​​