While Reading Hamlet       I learned a simple and wise existence       My voice is weak       We're heavy drinkers here, and women of loose morals       There's a sacred limit to any closeness       One travels straight ahead       The Breakup       Quatrain Sequence (selection)       It's not with a lover's lyre      

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While Reading Hamlet

A dust-covered patch to the right of the cemetery.
Beyond that, a river of unfolding blue.
"Get thee to a nunnery," you said, "Or marry
An idiot --- It's up to you."

That's the sort of thing princes always say,
But I won't forget it as I grow older.
May your words keep flowing as centuries wear away,
Like an ermine mantle tossed over someone's shoulder.

 

I learned a simple and wise existence

I learned a simple and wise existence,
I learned to look at the sky and pray,
And in the evening to walk a good distance,
Walking unneeded worries away.

When ravines rustle and burdock roams
And yellow-berried rowans are in their glory,
I put together light-hearted poems,
About life, ephemeral, transitory.

I return.    The fluffy cat doesn't glower:
He licks my palm and purrs long and hard,
And a light comes on in the little tower
Of a nearby lakeside lumberyard.

Sometimes there's sound for a moment or more ---
The cry of a stork on the house or near it.
--- And if you should happen to knock on my dorr,
I very much doubt if I would hear it.

 

My voice is weak, my will doesn't weaken though

My voice is weak, my will doesn't weaken though,
I feel even better without love.
Heaven is high, mountain breezes blow,
And my thoughts are as chaste as the sky above.

My nurse-insomnia is elsewhere and
Gray ashes do not chill me to the marrow,
The tower clock's terribly crooked hand
No longer looks to me like a deadly arrow.

How quickly the past is losing its grip on my heart!
Deliverance is near.    I'll forgive everything,
As I watch a sunbeam settle down and start
To caress the green ivy, dewy with spring.

 

We're heavy drinkers here, and women of loose morals

We're heavy drinkers here, and women of loose morals---
How unhappy all of us are in our crowd.
Flowers and birds all over the walls
Are languishing for lack of a cloud.

There's a little puff of smoke, a rope
Of smoke over your black pipe.
I'm wearing a tight skirt in the hope
Of appearing a svelte, elegant type.

The windows have been forever nailed shut.
What's it like outside --- Is it raining or snowing?
Your eyes are not just cautious, but
Cat eyes, cautious both coming and going.

Oh, how my heart is languishing ---
Could I be waiting for my death knell?
And that girl over there who's dancing
No doubt about it, she'll end in hell.

 

There's a sacred limit to any closeness

There's a sacred limit to any closeness,
Even the passionate fact can't transcend,
Though in fearful silence lips on lips may press
And the heart love tears to pieces won't mend.

And friendship is powerless and years
Of intense high-minded happiness,
Where the soul is free, a stranger to fears
Of the slow languors of passionate excess.

Those who strive to reach it play the part
Of madness, those who succeed are stricken --- And
Now you understand why my heart
Is not beating beneath your hand.

 

One travels straight ahead, the other / In great circles likes to go

One travels straight ahead, the other
In great circles likes to go,
Awaiting return to the home of his father,
Awaiting a girl he used to know.
But when I walk, trouble tags behind,
With a kind of desultory purpose,
We speed into nowhere and never-you-mind,
Like trains plunging over the precipice.

 

The Breakup

Not weeks, not months --- it took us years
To part.    And now at last we feel,
Having a gray wreath over our ears,
The breeze of freedom, cool and real.

No more being betrayed and betraying,
And you don't have to listen all night
To the evidence I've been busy arraying
Which proves me incomparably right.

 

Quatrain Sequence (Selection)

Marble crumbles, steel rots like a leaf,
Gold rusts.    Everything's ready to die.
The most durable things on earth are grief
And a single word, majestically high.

 

It's not with a lover's lyre

It's not with a lover's lyre, not at all
That I go around, attracting a crowd.
It's the rattle with which lepers crawl
That in my hands keeps singing aloud.