Each single Angel is terrible. And yet, woe to me!
I call upon you, almost deadly birds of the soul,
knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of the brightest stood on the simple threshhold,
For journey a little disguised and no longer dreadful;
(Young man to young man, as, curious, he peered outside).
Should the archangel, the dangerous one, behind the stars now
step just a little lower and forward: pounding
our own heart would slay us. Who are you?
Early successes, you coddled children of making,
Mountain ranges, morning red-bathed ridges
of all creation, -- pollen of blooming diety,
joints of light, halls, stairways, thrones,
rooms of being, shields of rapture, tumults of
stormy enchanted emotion and suddenly, separate,
mirrors: which draw their own streaming
beauty back into their faces again.
For we, when we feel, evaporate; oh we
breath ourselves out and away; from embers to embers
ever fainter scent we give forth. True, one may say to us,
"yes, you've gone into my blood -- this room, the spring's
filling itself with you . . ." What's the use? He can't keep us,
we vanish into and around him. And they who are beautiful,
oh, who'll hold them back? Incessantly appearance stands
forth in their faces and then departs. As dew on the morning grass
lifts what is ours from us, as the heat from a
hot dish of food. O smile, where to? O gaze:
new, warm, escaping surge of the heart --;
woe to me: we ourselves are that. Does, then, the world space
in which we dissolve ourselves, taste of us? Do the angels
really grasp only what's theirs, what has flowed from them,
or sometimes, as if by mistake, is a little
of our being with it? Are we mixed in with their
features just as much as the vagueness in the faces
of pregnant women? They don't notice in the maelstrom
of their return to themselves. (How should they see it?)
Lovers are able, if angels understood them, to speak peculiarly
in the night air. For it seems that everything's
hiding us. See, the trees exist; the houses,
in which we live are still there. We alone
pass by it all like an airy movement.
And everything unites to silence us, half as
shame, perhaps, and half as inexpressible hope.
Lovers, each fully satisfied in the other,
I ask you about us. You take hold of each other. Can you prove it?
Look, with me it so happens that my hands become aware
of each other, or that my worn
face takes rest in them. That gives me a little
feeling. But who because of that would dare even exist?
You, however, who in rapture take the other
to yourself, until, overwhelmed, he begs
you, "no more"; who under each other's hands
become more abundant like grapes on the vines;
as you sometimes sink, but only because the other
has wholly emerged -- I ask you about us. I know
you touch one another so blissfully, because the caress persists,
because the place which you, enchanted ones, conceal,
does not disappear, because you discover beneath it
pure continuity. So you promise one another eternity, almost,
in your embraces. And, indeed, when you've withstood
the fright of the first glance, the longing at the window,
and the first walk together, once through the garden:
Lovers, are you still the same? When you rise up and
set yourselves on each other's lips, drink to drink:
oh how the drinker strangely escapes from the scene.
Were you not amazed by the caution of human gesture
on ancient Grecian pillars? Weren't love and parting
lightly laid on their shoulders, as if both were made
of different stuff than for us? Think of their hands,
which lightly rest, though power resides in their bodies.
These masters of self knew this: thus far have we come,
it is for us to touch one another like this; more strongly
the gods press against us. But that is the gods' business.
If only we could find a pure, contained, narrow,
human strip of orchard for ourselves in between
stream and stone. For our own heart transcends us
again, always, as theirs did. And we cannot any longer
gaze after it into pictures that soothe it, nor into
divine bodies, in which it is even more greatly restrained.
Translation ©1990 by Catherine A. Hampton. All rights reserved. Do not republish or distribute in any form, electronic or hard copy, without the author's permission.
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