Will Stone,
Exmoor, 2020
* Anthony Stephens, Rainer Maria’s Gedichte an die Nacht: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1972).
POEMS TO NIGHT
The Siblings
O now we have, with what whimpering,
caressed ourselves, shoulders and eyelid.
And night has withdrawn into the rooms
like a wounded beast, in pain through us.
Were you elected from all for me,
was the sister not sufficient?
Lovely as a valley to me was your essence,
and now, too, from the prow of the heavens
it bows down an unfailing apparition
and he takes possession. Where to go?
Alas, with the gesture of mourning
you incline towards me, unconsoled.
(Paris, end of 1913)
When your face consumes me
like tears the one who weeps,
my brow, my mouth propagates
around the features I know for you.
(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)
Once I took into my hands
your face. The moon fell upon it.
Most unfathomable of things
beneath an overflowing of tears.
Like a willing thing, quietly subsisting,
it was almost like holding something
and yet was no entity in the cold
night that infinitely eludes me.
Oh we stream towards these places,
pressing in on the narrow surface
all the waves of our heart;
yearning and weakness,
and to whom finally do we bear them?
Alas, to the stranger, who misunderstood us,
alas to the other, whom we never found,
to those servants, bound to us,
springtime winds, that with it vanished
and the loser, silence.
(Paris, end of 1913)
From face to face
what rising up.
From the guilty breaks out
sacrifice and forgiveness.
Does the night not blow cool,
splendidly distant,
moving across the centuries.
Raise the area of feeling.
Suddenly the angels
see the harvest.
(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)
Look, angels sense through space
their infinite feelings.
Our incandescence would be their coolness.
Look, angels glow through space.
Whilst we, who know nothing more,
resist one thing, whilst another occurs in vain,
they stride on, enraptured by their intention,
across their fully formed domain.
(Paris, end of 1913)
Did I not breathe out of midnights,
on such a flood, for the love of you,
that someday you’d come?
For I hoped to appease your countenance
with almost unblemished magnificence,
when in eternal supposition
it rested awhile against mine.
Soundless the space in my outline;
in order to sate your great upward gaze
my blood was mirrored, deepened.
When through the olive trees’ pale separation
the night made me stronger with stars,
I rose, stood and turned back,
mastered the realization
I never referred to you later.
Oh what utterance was sown in me
should your smile ever come,
that I survey world space upon you.
But you don’t come, or you come too late.
Fall, angels, over this blue
flax field. Angels, angels, reap.
(Paris, end of 1913)
So, now it will be the angel
who drinks slowly from my features
the wine-enlightened face.
Thirsting, who signalled you to come?
How thirsty you are. God’s cataract
plunges through every vein. How
you can be so thirsty. Abandon
yourself to thirst. (How you have grasped me.)
And I feel, on the current, how your gaze
was parched, and towards your blood
so inclined that I overflow your brows,
those pure ones, completely.
(Paris, end of 1913)
Away, I asked you finally to taste my smile
(if it was not delectable),
in its irresistible approach behind the stars in the East
the angel waits that I make myself limpid.
That no look, no trace of yours limits him,
when he steps into the clearing;
let him be the suffering that afflicted me, wild nature:
and trust in the watering place.
Was I green or sweet to you, let us forget all,
or the shame will overtake us.
Whether I flower or expiate he will calmly appraise,
whom I did not tempt, who came…
(Paris, end of 1913)
Strong, silent, candelabra placed
on the edge: above the night becomes distinct;
we drain ourselves in unlit wavering
before your foundation.
Ours is: not to know the outcome
in the mad inner domain,
you appear out of our impediments
and glow like a high mountain range.
Your desire lies above our kingdom,
and we barely grasp what falls upon us;
like the pure night of the spring equinox
you are there, dividing day and day.
Who could ever infuse you
with the mixture that secretly dulls us?
You win glory from all that is monumental,
and we exist in the most trivial.
When we weep, we are nothing but touching,
where we look, we are at the highest awakening;
our smile is far from seducing,
and even when it does seduce, to whom does it attach?
(Anyone.) Angel, is this lament, is this lament?
What is it then, this lament of mine?
Alas, I shriek, with two pieces of wood I strike
without hope anyone will hear.
That I am noisy does not make you louder,
when you don’t feel me, because I am.
Light, light! Have the stars survey me
more ardently. For I am fading.
(Ronda, beginning of 1913)
Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures
the star that was a moment past – (and me),
out of those mountainous lands there, which now have night,
night winds for a time – (and me),
out of this river on the valley floor, which catches
the gleam of a torn sky-clearing – (and me)
out of me and all of that, to make
a single thing, Lord: out of me and the feeling
with which the flock, returned to the pen,
in acquiescence breathe out the immense black
no-longer-being of the world – me and every light
in the darkness of so many houses, Lord:
to make one thing; out of strangers, for
there is not one I know, Lord, and me and me
to make one thing; out of the sleepers,
the old men in the hospice, those strangers
who cough gravely in their beds, and out of
sleep-drunk infants at a foreign breast,
out of so much
