The bedroom on the courtyard, and the tree
of heaven that brushed our window there, we slept
and loved and slept all the long afternoon;
the quiet in the streets and twilipht still
at ten o’clock, the sidewalk tables crowded,
the Arab selling rugs, and we moved south,
south with the end of summer to a shore
that looked toward Africa, and fleshly white
sea-lilacs đied in the sand,
Then north again with spring, the wooden inn
dry-rotting under the Heiterwand, the major
without a pension, fragile and polite,
full-breasted Rosa singing to the starved
and pederastic poet, these were broken
wax fgures in a wax-pale landscape. We
were new, invincible, we paid our bills
and then moved on. A moment to admire
the glister of decay, and we moved on
briphtÌly among the ruins.
Late, late in youth we heard the market wapons
roll in the streets, the blind violinist play,
but did we hear the shamble of the waiter
coming to count our saucers, did we hear
the shots, the hobnailed echoes die away?
And bedward stumbling, did we understand
at daybreak with our sweethearts, that we should
at evening waken in a furnished room
somewhere, alone and oid?
This is our story. We have drunk the wine
of silence on the star-drenched Adriatic,
have followed southward cranes and followed spring
to uttermost Lapland. Kneeling at the doors
of night clubs and bordellos, we have prayed
that suddenly opened wide they might reveal
our childhood country. We bave wasted lives
not Ours alone, have roamed the fuid earth
and all its foating capitals, tied fast
to the apron strings of vice,
The way is long. Insensitivity
is vice, “Why not” isvice. The tepid lovers
forsaken in cach other’s beds, the habit
of little treacheries, the friends unliked,
the joyless orgy, these and these are vice.
From felds as green as jellied mint, from houses
bright as our toys, substantial as our fathers,
we sailed against the sun and found ourselves
here in a countryside of phlegm-gray mist
and soot-gray shadowiess evil,
Is ít too late for homeward journeys? Prince,
Archangel, Satan, what we ask is only
a word to unlock the corridors of dream.
Lest in the daylong wilderness we wander
too long without direction, take our hands,
close tight our eyes and lead us into niphts
rich with the smell of chidhood. Life is heavy
on our bent shoulders. Tift the burden, Prince,
and gently guide us toward the mother darkness,
the comforting arms, the stupor of the tomb.
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