Suddenly someone shakes this twofold hour as if in a sieve,
And the powder of the two realities, mixed together, falls
On my hands full of drawings of ports
Where huge sailing ships are casting off with no intention of
returning . . .
Powder of white and black gold on my fingers . . .
My hands are the steps of that girl leaving the fair,
Alone and contented like this day . . .
[1914]
She sings, poor reaper, perhaps
Believing herself to be happy.
She sings, she reaps, and her voice,
Full of glad and anonymous poverty,
Wavers like the song of a bird
In the air as clean as a doorstep,
And there are curves in the soft tissue
Of the sound her song is weaving.
Hearing her brings joy and sadness,
The field and its toil are in her voice,
And she sings as if she had
More reasons than life for singing.
Ah, sing, sing for no reason!
In me what feels is always
Thinning. Pour into my heart
Your waving, uncertain voice!
Ah, to be you while being I!
To have your glad unconsciousness
And be conscious of it! O sky!
O field! O song! Knowledge
Is so heavy and life so brief!
Enter inside me! Make
My soul your weightless shadow!
And take me with you, away!
[1914]
SOME RANDOM VERSES
Live with nostalgia for the moment
Even as you live it . . .
We’re empty boats, blown forward
Like loose strands of hair
By a long and steady wind, living
Without knowing what we feel or want . . .
Let’s make ourselves aware of this
As of a still pond
In the midst of a torpid landscape
Under a desolate sky,
And may our self-awareness
No longer be roused by desire . . .
In this way, equal to the whole hour
In all its sweetness,
Our life, no longer us, will be
Our pre-wedding: a color,
A fragrance, a swaying of trees,
And death won’t come early or late . . .
What matters is that nothing matter
Anymore . . . Whether Fate
Hangs over us or quietly and obscurely
Lurks in the distance
Is all the same . . . Here’s the moment . . .
Let’s be it . . . What good is thinking?
11 OCTOBER 1914
PASSERBY
I hear a piano playing, and laughter
Behind the music. I pause
In my dreaming to look up: it’s from
The tall building—third floor.
So much joy in those young voices!
It’s false? How do I know?
Their pleasure makes me shiver with envy!
It’s banal? I have none.
They may be happy on the third floor
Of that tall building. I
Pass by, dreaming of that home as if
Dreaming of another country.
24 JUNE 1915
DIARY IN THE SHADE
Do you still remember me?
You knew me a long time ago.
I was that sad child you didn’t care for
But then gradually got to be interested in
(In his anguish, his sadness, and something else)
And ended up liking, almost without realizing it.
Remember? The sad Child who played on the beach
By himself, quietly, far away from the others,
And he sometimes looked over at them sadly but without
regret . . .
I see that you occasionally steal a glance at me.
Do you remember? Do you want to see if you remember? Ah,
I understand . . .
Don’t you still sense in my sad and calm face
And sometimes looked at them with sad eyes but without
regret?
I know you’re watching and don’t understand what sadness
it is
That makes me look sad.
It isn’t regret or nostalgia, disappointment or resentment.
No . . . It’s the sadness
Of one who, in the great prenatal realm,
Must have received from God the Secret—
The secret of the world’s illusion,
Of the absolute emptiness of things—
The incurable sadness
Of one who realizes that everything’s pointless, worthless,
That effort is an absurd waste,
And that life is a void,
Since disillusion always follows on the heels of illusion
And Death seems to be the meaning of Life . . .
It’s this, but not only this, that you see in my face
And that makes you steal an occasional glance at me.
There is, besides this,
That grim astonishment, that black chill,
Which comes from the soul
Having been told a secret of God
In the prenatal realm, when life
Had still shown no sign of dawning
And the whole of the complex, luminous Universe
Was an inevitable destiny yet to be fulfilled.
If this doesn’t define me, nothing defines me.
And this doesn’t define me—
Because the Secret that God told me wasn’t only this.
There was something else, which led to my embracing
The unreal dimension, my delighting in it so much, my knack
For grasping the ungraspable and for feeling what can’t be
felt,
My inward dignity of an emperor, though I have no empire,
My world of dreams fashioned in broad daylight . . .
Yes, that is what gives
My face an oldness even older than my childhood,
And my gaze an anxiety within my happiness.
You occasionally steal a glance at me,
And you don’t understand me,
And you steal another glance, and another, and another . . .
Without God there’s nothing but life
And you’ll never be able to understand . . .
17 SEPTEMBER 1916
A piano on my street . . .
Children playing outside . . .
A Sunday, and the sun
Shining golden with joy . . .
My sorrow that makes me
Love all that’s indefinite . . .
Though I had little in life,
It pains me to have lost it.
But my life already
Runs deep in changes . . .
A piano I miss hearing,
Those children I miss being!
25 FEBRUARY 1917
Where’s my life going, and who’s taking it there?
Why do I always do what I didn’t want to do?
What destiny in me keeps on marching in the darkness?
What part of me that I don’t know is my guide?
My destiny has a direction and a method,
My life adheres to a path and a scale,
But my self-awareness is the sketchy outline
Of what I do and am; it isn’t me.
I don’t even know myself in what I knowingly do.
I never reach the end of what I do with an end in mind.
The pleasure or pain I embrace isn’t what it really is.
I move on, but there’s no I inside me that moves.
Who am I, Lord, in your darkness and your smoke?
What soul besides mine inhabits my soul?
Why did
you give me the feeling of a path
If the path I seek I’m not seeking, if in me nothing walks
Except through an effort in my steps that’s not mine,
Except by a fate hidden from me in my acts?
Why am I conscious if consciousness is an illusion?
What am I between “what” and the facts?
Close my eyes, obscure my soul’s vision!
O illusions! Since I know nothing about myself or life,
May I enjoy at least that nothing, without faith
but calmly,
May I at least sleep through living, like a forgotten
beach . . .
5 JUNE 1917
Ah! the anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart!
I speak, and the words I say are mere sound.
I suffer, and it’s just me.
Ah! If I could only wrest from music the secret
Timbre of its shout!
What rage that my sorrow can’t even shout,
That its shout goes no farther
Than the silence, which returns, in the air
Of the night filled with nothing!
15 JANUARY 1920
NON NECESSE EST
It’s a stage—a stage in a dream—
Where the actors have nothing to do.
There a smiling destiny
Fuses dreaming with being.
Dreamed scenery, deceive him!
Action, don’t take place!
Fool the one who made you,
O fictions of the interlude!
And may the soul live in ethereal
Detachment, forgetting about life,
Which is womanish and plebeian,
And death, which isn’t anything!
[1921?]
Whoever, horizon, passes beyond you
Passes from view, not from living or being.
Don’t call the soul dead when it flies away.
Say: It vanished out there in the sea.
Be for us, sea, the symbol of all life—
Uncertain, unchanging, and more than our seeing!
Once Earth makes its circle and death its journey,
The ship and the soul will reappear.
11 JANUARY 1922
NOTHING
Ah, the soft, soft playing,
Like someone about to cry,
Of a song that’s woven
Out of artifice and moonlight . . .
Nothing to make us remember
Life.
A prelude of courtesies
Or a smile that faded . . .
A cold garden in the distance . . .
And in the soul that finds it,
Just the absurd echo of its empty
Flight.
8 NOVEMBER 1922
I don’t know who I am right now. I dream.
Steeped in feeling myself, I sleep. In this
Calm hour my thought forgets its thinking,
My soul has no soul.
If I exist, it’s wrong to know it. If I
Wake up, I feel I’m mistaken. I just don’t know.
There’s nothing I want, have, or remember.
I have no being or law.
A moment of consciousness between illusions,
I’m bounded all around by phantoms.
Sleep on, oblivious to other people’s hearts,
O heart belonging to no one!
6 JANUARY 1923
I hear the wind blowing in the night.
I sense, high up in the air, the whip
Of I don’t know whom hitting I don’t know what.
Everything’s heard; nothing’s seen.
Ah, everything is symbol and analogy.
The wind that blows and this cold night
Are something other than night and wind—
They’re shadows of Being and of Thought.
Things tell us through stories what they don’t say.
I don’t know what drama I ruined by thinking—
A drama the night and the wind were telling.
I heard it. Thinking of it, I heard in vain.
Everything softly hums, the same.
The wind stops blowing, the night advances,
Day begins and I exist, anonymous.
But what happened was much more than this.
24 SEPTEMBER 1923
THE SCAFFOLD
The time I’ve spent dreaming—
Years and years of my life!
Ah, how much of my past
Was only the false life
Of a future I imagined!
Here on the bank of the river
I grow calm for no reason.
Its empty flowing mirrors,
Cold and anonymous,
The life I’ve lived in vain.
How little hope ever attains!
What longing is worth the wait?
Any child’s ball
Rises higher than my hope,
Rolls farther than my longing.
Waves of the river, so slight
That you aren’t even waves,
The hours, days and years
Pass quickly—mere grass or snow
Which die by the same sun.
I spent all I didn’t have.
I’m older than I am.
The illusion that kept me going
Was a queen only on stage:
Once undressed, her reign was over.
Soft sound of these slow waters
Aching for shores you’ve passed,
How drowsy are the memories
Of misty hopes! What dreams
All dreaming and life amount to!
What did I make of my life?
I found myself when already lost.
Impatient, I let myself be,
As I might let a lunatic go on
Believing what I’d proved was wrong.
Dead sound of these gentle waters
That flow because they must,
Take not only my memories
But also my dead hopes—
Dead, because they must die.
I’m already my future corpse.
Only a dream links me to myself—
The hazy and belated dream
Of what I should have been—a wall
Around my abandoned garden.
Take me, passing waves,
To the oblivion of the sea!
Bequeath me to what I won’t be—
I, who raised a scaffold
Around the house I never built.
29 AUGUST 1924
GLOSSES
I.
Every work is in every way futile.
The futile wind, stirring up futile leaves,
Describes our effort and our general state.
Given or achieved, everything is Fate.
Calmly observe, above your own self,
Lonely and infinite Possibility,
Which uselessly gives rise to what’s real.
Hush and, unless it’s to think, don’t feel.
2.
Neither good nor evil defines the world.
Oblivious to both, the Fate we call God
From the heaven we suppose is “on high”
Rules neither well nor badly earth and sky.
We go through life laughing and crying,
The one state being a contracted face,
And the other some water with a little salt.
Beyond good and evil, Fate decides all.
3.
The sun plies the sky’s twelve signs,
Forever rising and forever dying
In the horizons of what we see. Reality,
As we know it, is where we happen to be.
Fictions of our own consciousness,
We’ve laid instinct and knowledge to rest.
And the sun, unmoving, doesn’t even ply
The twelve si
gns that aren’t in the sky.
14 AUGUST 1925
CHESS
Pawns, they go out into the peaceful night,
Tired and full of fictitious feelings.
They’re going home, talking about nothing,
Dressed in furs, coats and pelisses.
As pawns, destiny only allows them
One forward square per move, unless
They’re given another one diagonally,
On a new path, through someone else’s death.
Eternal subjects of the noble pieces,
Like the bishop or rook, that move far and fast,
They’re suddenly overtaken by fate
In their lonely march, and breathe their last.
One or another, making it all the way,
Redeems not his own but someone else’s life.
And the game goes on, indifferent to each piece,
The relentless hand moving them all alike.
Then, poor creatures dressed in furs or silks,