I know his father—for a year now
We’ve talked as he shaves my beard.
When he told me the news, as much
Heart as I have gave a shudder;
All flustered, I hugged him,
And he wept on my shoulder.
In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.
But, my God, I feel human pain!
Don’t ever deny me that!
28 MARCH 1934
I daydream, far from my cozy
Self-awareness as a man.
I don’t know who my soul is,
Nor does it know who I am.
Understand it? It would take time.
Explain it? Don’t know if I can.
And in this misunderstanding
Between who I am and what is I
There’s a whole other meaning
Lying between earth and sky.
In that gap is born the universe
With suns and stars past counting.
It has a profound meaning,
Which I know. It’s outside me.
31 MARCH 1934
Yes, at last a certain peace . . .
A certain ancient awareness,
Felt in life’s very substance,
Which tells me the soul won’t end,
No matter what road it follows . . .
Facile vision?
A belief shared by many? No,
Because what I feel is different.
It’s a life, not a belief . . .
It’s not the skin but the heart.
Sun setting in the West, I know
I’ll see a different sun tomorrow—
Different, yet the same, in the East.
All is illusion, but nothing lies:
The Nothing that’s everything is Being.
31 MARCH 1934
In the peace of night, full of so much enduring
And of books I’ve read,
Reading them while dreaming, feeling and musing,
Scarcely seeing them,
I raise my head that’s suddenly dazed
By my useless reading,
And I see there’s peace in the night now ending,
But not in my heart.
As a child I was different . . . To become what I am,
I grew up and forgot.
What I have today is a silence, a law.
Have I won or lost?
[APRIL 1934]
All beauty is a dream, even if it exists,
For beauty is always more than it is.
The beauty I see in you
Isn’t here, next to me.
What I see in you lives where I dream,
Far away from here. If you exist,
I only know it
Because I just dreamed it.
Beauty is a music which, heard
In dreams, overflowed into life.
But it’s not exactly life:
It’s the life that dreamed.
22 APRIL 1934
Rolling wave that returns,
Smaller, to the sea that brought you,
Scattering as you retreat,
As if the sea were nothing—
Why, on your return journey,
Do you take only your disappearing?
Why don’t you also take
My heart to that ancient sea?
I’ve had it for such a long time
That I’m tired of having to feel it.
So take it in that faint murmur
By which I hear you fleeing!
9 MAY 1934
In this world where we forget,
We are shadows of who we are,
And the real actions we perform
In the other world, where we live as souls,
Are here wry grins and appearances.
Night and confusion engulf
Everything we know down here:
Projections and scattered smoke
From that fire whose glow is invisible
To the eyes we’re given by life.
But one man or another, looking
Closely, can see for a moment
In the shadows and their shifting
The purpose in the other world
Of the actions that make him live.
Thus he discovers the meaning
And his gaze’s intuition
Returns to his far-off body,
Imagined and understood.
Homesick shadow of that body,
Though a lie, it feels the cord
Connecting it to the sublime
Truth that avidly casts it
On the ground of space and time.
9 MAY 1934
Seagulls are flying close to the ground.
They say this means it’s going to rain.
But it’s not raining yet. Right now
There are seagulls close to the ground
Flying—that’s all.
Likewise, when there’s happiness,
They say sadness is on its way.
Perhaps, but so what? If today
Is full of happiness, where
Does sadness fit in?
It doesn’t. It belongs to tomorrow.
When it comes, then I’ll be sad.
Today is pure and good. The future
Doesn’t exist today. There’s a wall
Between us and it.
Enjoy what you have, drunk on being!
Leave the future in its place.
Poems, wine, women, ideals—
Whatever you want, if it’s what is,
Is for you to enjoy.
Tomorrow, tomorrow . . . Be, tomorrow,
What tomorrow brings you. For now
Accept, be ignorant, and believe.
Keep close to the ground, but flying,
Like the seagull.
18 MAY 1934
The beautiful, wondrous fable
Which they told me long ago
Still slumbers in my soul
But is a different fable now.
Back then the fable told
Of fairies, gnomes and elves;
Now it tells only about
Our slavishly wavering selves.
But, when properly considered,
Aren’t elves, fairies and gnomes
Just the mistaken projections
Of a wavering that’s all our own?
We create what we don’t have
Because we’re sorry it’s missing,
And whatever we long to see
Is what we end up seeing.
Later, tired of that vision
Which sees only what’s unreal,
We shut up all the windows
And in our souls are sealed.
Although the vision is gone,
The figures that took part
Still dance, and in great number,
But only inside our heart.
9 JUNE 1934
When I die and you, meadow,
Become something strange to me,
There will be better meadows
For the better self I’ll be.
And the flowers that are beautiful
In the fields I see down here
Will be stars of many colors
In the vast fields there.
And perhaps my heart, seeing
That other nature, more natural
Than the vision that fooled us
Into thinking it was real,
Will, like a bird at last alighting
On a branch, look back and recall
This flight of existence
As nothing at all.
1 JULY 1934
There were people who loved me,
There were people I loved.
Today I blushed
Because of who I once was.
I felt ashamed
Of being, here and now,
The one who always dreams
And never steps ou
t,
Ashamed of realizing
That I can have no more
Than this dream of what
I could have been—before.
6 AUGUST 1934
The girls go in groups
Down the road, singing.
They sing old songs,
The kind that bring tears
When they come to mind.
They sing just to sing,
Because others have sung . . .
And the song they’ve remembered,
Singing it without letup,
Is forever old and present.
In the warm, boisterous sound
There’s something eternal
—Life, joy, their girlishness—
That brings to the windows
The girls who don’t sing,
The girls who, in the shadow
Of promised or hoped-for love,
Hear their own pained voice
Contained in the lyrics
Laughed and shouted outside.
Yes, that song passing by
Inadvertently expresses
The great and human tragedy
Of loving or not loving—
The same endless tragedy . . .
18 AUGUST 1934
Since night was falling and I expected no one,
I bolted my door against the world,
And my peaceful, mean little home
Sank with me into a deep silence . . .
Drunk on aloneness, talking to myself,
Strolling about without a care,
I was that good and true friend
I can no longer find in the friends I have.
But someone suddenly knocked at the door,
And an entire poem went up in smoke . . .
It was the neighbor, reminding me
About lunch tomorrow. Yes, I’ll be there.
Once more bolting my door and myself,
I tried to resurrect in my heart
The stroll, the enthusiasm and the desire
That had made me drunk on what other people are.
In vain . . . Just the same furniture as always
And the inevitable walls staring at me,
Like a man who stopped looking at a dying fire
And saw no more fire when he looked again.
19 AUGUST 1934
If some day someone knocks at your door,
Saying that he’s my emissary,
Don’t believe it, even if it’s me,
Since my lofty pride won’t even consent
To knocking at the unreal door of heaven.
But if, without hearing anyone knock,
You should happen to open the door
And find someone there who seems to be waiting
For the courage to knock, consider. That
Was my emissary, and me, and what
My finally desperate pride will allow.
Open your door to the man who doesn’t knock!
5 SEPTEMBER 1934
Everything, except boredom, bores me.
I’d like, without being calm, to calm down,
To take life every day
Like a medicine—
One of those medicines everybody takes.
I aspired to so much, dreamed so much,
That so much so much made me into nothing.
My hands grew cold
From just waiting for the enchantment
Of the love that would warm them up at last.
Cold, empty
Hands.
6 SEPTEMBER 1934
Tell nothing to the one who told all—
The all that is never all told,
Those words made of velvet
Whose color no one knows.
Tell nothing to the one who bared
His soul . . . The soul can’t be bared.
Confession is made for the calm
It gives us to hear ourselves talk.
Everything is useless, and false.
It’s a top that a boy in the street
Releases just to see how it spins.
It spins. Tell nothing.
11 OCTOBER 1934
FREEDOM
You ask what freedom is? It means not being a slave to anything, whether to necessity or to chance; it means compelling Fortune to play on equal terms.
SENECA, IN EPISTLE 51 TO LUCILIUS
Ah, how delightful
To leave a task undone,
To have a book to read
And not even crack it!
Reading is a bore,
And studying isn’t anything.
The sun shines golden
With or without literature.
The river flows, fast or slow,
Without a first edition.
And the breeze, belonging
So naturally to morning,
Has time, it’s in no hurry.
Books are just paper painted with ink.
And to study is to distinguish, indistinctly,
Between nothing and not a thing.
How much better, when it’s foggy,
To wait for King Sebastian,
Whether or not he ever shows!
Poetry, dancing and charity are great things,
But what’s best in the world are children, flowers,
Music, moonlight and the sun, which only sins
When it withers instead of making things grow.
Greater than this
Is Jesus Christ,
Who knew nothing of finances
And had no library, as far as we know . . .
16 MARCH 1935
A gray but not cold day . . .
A day with
Seemingly no patience for being day
And which only on an impulse,
Out of an empty fit
Of duty, tempered with irony,
Finally gives light to a day
Just like me
Or else
Like my heart,
A heart that’s empty
Not of emotion
But of pursuing a goal—
A gray but not cold heart.
18 MARCH 1935
What matters is love.
Sex is just an accident:
It can be the same
Or different.
Man isn’t an animal:
He’s an intelligent flesh,
Though subject to sickness.
5 APRIL 1935
It was such a long time ago!
I don’t even know if it was in this life . . .
It’s painful to remember it . . .
To be unable to remember it is torture . . .
Yes, it was you,
Or someone who today is you.
Your naked foot rested
On the lion crouched in front of you.
This of course could never
Have happened,
But if it could, it would make life
Less tedious.
Ah, your faraway gaze!
Your lips from back then!
I don’t know how to love them anymore,
Since I never loved them in the first place.
And all of this, which promises
Huge gulfs of emotion,
Is the result of me simply looking at a rug
Which, like everything, is on the floor.
10 AUGUST 1935
UN SOIR À LIMA
The voice on the radio returns,
Announcing in an exaggerated drawl:
“And now
Un Soir à Lima . . .”
I stop smiling . . .
My heart stops beating . . .
And from the unconscious receiver
That sweet and accursed melody
Breaks forth . . .
My soul loses itself
In a suddenly resurrected memory . . .
The wooded slope shimmered
Under the great African moon.
The living room in our house was large, and
everything
Between it and the sea was lit up
By the dark brilliance of that gigantic moon . . .
But only I stood by the window.
My mother was at the piano
And played . . .
That very same
Un Soir à Lima.
My God, how distant and irrevocably lost all that is!
What has become of her noble bearing?
Of her dependably soothing voice?
Of her full and affectionate smile?
What there is today
To remind me of all that is this melody,
Our melody,
Still playing on the radio,
None other than Un Soir à Lima.
Her graying hair was so lovely
In the light,
And I never thought she would die
And leave me at the mercy of who I am!