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Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away
as laurel, a little darker than all the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border of every leaf (like the smile of a wind): - oh, why have to be human, and shunning Destiny, long for Destiny?... Not because happiness really exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss. Not out of curiosity, not just to practise the heart, that could still be there in laurel... But because being here is much, and because all this that's here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again. But this having been once on earth - can it ever be cancelled? And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it, trying to contain it within our simple hands, in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless heart. Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather hold on to it all for ever... But into the other relation, what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we've here slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one. Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life, the long experience of love; in fact, purely untellable things. But later, under the stars, what use? the more deeply untellable stars? Yet the wanderer too doesn't bring from mountain to valley a handful of earth; of for all untellable earth, but only a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, - possibly: Pillar, Tower?... but for saying, remember, oh, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose of this sly Earth, in urging a pair of lovers, just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them? Threshold: what does it mean to a pair of lovers, that they should be wearing their own worn threshold a little, they too, after the many before, before the many to come,... as a matter of course! Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home. Speak and proclaim. More than ever things we can live with are falling away, for that which is oustingly taking their place is an imageless act. Act under crusts, that will readily split as soon as the doing within outgrows them and takes a new outline. Between the hammers lives on our heart, as between the teeth the tongue, which, in spite of all, still continues to praise. Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you can't impress him with the splendour you've felt; in the cosmos where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show him some simple thing, refashioned by age after age, till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves. Tell him things. He'll stand more astonished: as you did beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt. Show him how happy a thing can be, how guileless and ours; how even the moaning of grief purely determines on form, serves as a thing, or dies into a thing, - to escape to a bliss beyond the fiddle. These things that live on departure understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all. Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts into - oh, endlessly - into ourselves! Whosoever we are. Earth, is it not just this that you want: to arise invisibly in us? Is not your dream to be one day invisible? Earth! invisible! What is your urgent command, if not transformation? Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need no more of your spring-times to win me over: a single one, ah, one, is already more than my blood can endure. Beyond all names I am yours, and have been for ages. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is Death, that friendly Death. Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future are growing less.... Supernumerous existence wells up in my heart. |