I SHOULD always have known; those who sang from the
river,
Those who moved to me, trembling, from the wood
Were the others: when I crushed on a finger, with a finger,
A petal of the blossom of the lime, I understood
(As I tasted, under the taste of the flower, the dark
Taste of the leaf, the flesh that has never flowered)
All the words of the wood but a final word:
Pure, yearning, unappeasable –
A word that went on forever, like the roar
The peoples of the bees made in the limes.
When they called from the rushes I heard you answer:
“I am a dweller of the Earth.”
The old woman who sat beside her wheel
In her cottage under the hill, and gave you tea
When the mist crept up around her, evenings,
And you came to her, slowly, out of the mist
Where you had run, all evening, by the shore
Naked, searching for your dress upon the sand –
She would say to you, each evening: “What you do will do,
But not forever …
What you want is a husband and children.”
And you would answer: “They will do,
But not forever.”
The old woman,
The stone maid sunk in the waters of the earth
Who murmured, “You too are fair
Not so fair as I, but fair as I was fair — ”
These, and the light that was caught in the boughs at sunset
And lay sleeping there, all night, beneath the leaves –
These said to you, softly: “You are only a child.
What would you be, if you could have your wish?
You are fair, child, as a child is fair.
How would you look, if you could have your wish?”
You answered:
“I would be invisible.”
When I woke it was still night.
I saw, as I always saw
In the window across the room –
Gray as the gray-green milk of the stream –
A castle rising above limes:
A castle that has never been taken.
I felt in the map-pocket of the skirt
Of my leather coat, but mice had eaten the bar
Of chocolate, and left me foil like tinsel.
There was moonlight.
At the path out into the wood, a deer
Stood with stars in the branches of its antlers:
An iron deer.
Then there was nothing but night.
I felt turning above my hand
For an instant, the wing of a swallow –
Your hand opened across my hand.
I reached to you, but you whispered: “Only look.”
I whispered: “I see only moonlight.”
“I am here behind the moonlight.”
You are there.
I thought at first
That you were only a ghost,
A ghost asleep in a castle that is asleep.
But these German ghosts – harsh clumsy things –
Haunt no one, but only change
Men into things, things into things.
Many a chandelier
Clouded with china roses, many a swan
Floating beside its shepherd, among cresses,
Many a star
Set in the antlers of an iron deer
Was once a sleeper wandering through the wood.
Some walked through the pits of the glade to a ghost
And were changed: a ghost wants blood;
And it will do –
but not forever.
But I shall be with you here forever.
Past the dust of thorns, past the sleepers wound
Like worms in the terrible chains of their breath,
Here in the last, least room
I shall lie in your arms forever.
If you sleep I shall sleep, if you wake I shall wake,
If you die I shall also die.
You said: “I am then not dead?”
You are only sleeping …
When I come to you, sprawled there asleep
At the center of all the webs, at the final
Point of the world: one drop of your blood,
I shall bend to you, slowly –
“You are asleep.
The leaves breathe with your breath. The last, least stir
Of the air that stumbles through a fur of leaves
Says the sound of your name, over and over, over and over;
But someday –
Years off, many and many years —
I shall come to you there asleep;
I shall open your lips, sink past them into your dream,
I shall take you and …”
Tell me.
“No, no, I shall never.”
Tell me.
“You must not know.”
Tell me.
“I – I shall kiss your throat.”
My throat?
“There, it is only a dream.
I shall not so – I shall never so.”
I looked at you.
I saw, in your eyes beside my eyes,
A gaze pure, yearning, unappeasable:
Your lips trembled, set
For an instant in the slightest smile
I ever saw;
Your cold flesh, faint with starlight,
Wetted a little with the dew,
Had, to my tongue, the bloom of fruit –
Of the flower: the lime-tree flower.
And under the taste of the flower
There was –
I felt in the middle of the circle
Of your mouth against my flesh
Something hard, scraping gently, over and over
Against the skin of my throat:
Then in one small motion
Your teeth were fixed in my throat.
I would wake and fall asleep and wake:
Your face above me
Glowed faintly now — something light and living
Was pulsing under its flesh.
When I saw that it was my blood,
I used my last strength and, slowly,
Slowly, opened my eyes
And pushed my arms out, that the moonlight pierced and
held –
I said: “I want you”; and the words were so heavy
That they hung like darkness over the world,
And you said to me, softly: “You must not so.
I am only a girl.
Before I was a ghost I was only a girl.”
I grew back, slowly, into a child.
The past is a child that sucks our blood
Back into the earth … I said, “Little Sister,
I know now that you are my life.”
You answered:
“I am also death.”
When they find me, here except for my blood,
A child in the moonlight of the wood,
They will search for you all night: harsh clumsy things
In their tunics and leather shorts and pigtails.
All the badges along the bands of their hats will shine.
When all but one has said to you, Gute Nacht,
And you have answered, are almost free
To call to me there in the bonds of the moonlight,
The last will mutter cunningly, Griiss Gott.
Then, blanching, as all my blood
Flows from your starry limbs into your heart –
When, at the name of God,
You can say nothing, O Being of the Earth –
You will cry out bitterly, and they will seize you
And bind you and boil you to death – the dead also die –
There at the fountain of the square
Just under the castle, by the iron deer,
And making of you a black-pudding, deck it with schillings
and thalers.
And serve it, all herrlich, to the Man of the castle
With a sign stuck on it:
To eat is verboten.
What shall I call you, O Being of the Earth?
“What I wish you to call me I shall never hear.”
We shall change; we shall change: but at last, their stars,
We shall rest in the branches of the antlers
Of the iron deer.
But not forever:
Stars fall, the iron is earth; and our castle, earth
At its end, a forest through which the deer
May run on, life on life, beneath the limes
That spring age after age from our great limbs –
Will live, as this wood knows life;
Will breathe, as the wood breathes, years.
Except one word
Goes on, always, under the years,
A word we have never understood;
And our life, our death, and what came past our life
Are lost within that steady sound:
Pure, yearning, unappeasable,
The one spell turns above us like the stars.
And yet surely, at the last, all these are one,
We also are forever one:
A dweller of the Earth, invisible.
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