Tesserae

Duino Elegy II

Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I go on
singing at you in the knowledge of what you are –
you all but deadly birds of the soul.
Where are the days of Tobias, when one of thsese
most radiant creatures stood at the simple doorway
ready to travel, in part disguised and so not
as frightening (a young man, in fact, like the one
who peered out curiously to see who was there).
If the archangel bent down low, dangerously
bent from behind the spread of stars, took one step
towards us, we would be beaten to death
by our own high-beating heart. Who are you?


Duino Elegy V

Angel! If there were some place we didn’t know of
and there, on a carpet impossible to describe,
lovers could show off what they cannot here,
the bold and high figure of their hearts’ swinging,
the towering of their pleasure –
ladders for a long time standing on no solid ground
but tremblingly leant only into the other’s leaning – 
and there they could perform all this
before spectators crowded around them,
the silent and innumerable dead:
Would these then throw down their last, forever-hoarded,
forever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the, at last,
truly smiling pair, there, on the quenched
carpet?


Duino Elegy VI

Oh, mothers of heroes, springs of those torrential rivers!
You rifts into which, from the heart’s high rim,
plunge grief-stricken girls, your son’s future sacrifices.


Duino Elegy IV

Who shows a child for what he really is?
Who sets him in the starts and thrusts a rule
in his hand to measure the distance of separation?
Who creates death for a child from grey bread
which hardens – or who leaves it
in his round mouth like the core of a sweet apple?
. . . Murderers are easy to understand. But this – 
to be so possessed by death, the whole of death,
even before life has really begun – to take in
the fact, but gently, so as not to refuse in anger – 
is unspeakable.


Duino Elegy IX

But truly because being here is so much –
because everything in this fleeting world seems to need us,
calls to us strangely. Us – the most fleeting of all.
Just once for each thing. Once and no more.
And we too, just once. And never again. Yet to have been
this once, and so utterly, even if only once,
our having been on this earth can never be undone.


Duino Elegy XIII

Who has twisted us this way round,
so no matter what we do we are always
in the position of one leaving? Just as,
on the last possible hill from which he can
glimpse his whole valley one final time,
he turns, stops there, he lingers – 
so we live on, forever bidding goodbye.