but I love you, I love you as if
all this were true, and yet may be.
Adam wept but was not forgiven.
And he was not allowed to return
to the only place where we are alive:
“If you want what is yours, you shall have it.
So what will you, you who are in that place
where the heart seeks as if God almighty:
where the heart is all radiance and offering.”
The cold of the world—
someone will warm.
The deadened sun—
someone will raise.
These miracles—
someone will take by the hand,
like a naughty child, and say:
“Come, I will show you something
that you have never seen!”
1990-1992
TRISTAN AND ISOLDE
(Translated by Ksenia Golubovich & Caroline Clark)
FIRST INTRODUCTION
Pray listen, my good people,
to a story of love and death,
listen whoever wants to,
for it’s within our every breath.
For the begging heart sends up such thanks
as if for its daily bread
when someone is lost,
when someone is dead,
or just as alone as we.
Let’s sew a dress of darkness,
a monk’s cloak of old,
let’s ask for water from the well
and the northern winter’s cold—
a winter lovely as topaz
though with a crack inside.
Like white topaz held to the eye,
when we lean to look outside
and into the streetlamp’s light.
Fate alone is like fate
and unlike anything else:
not like the far distant sail,
not like a shield, a horn, or the Grail,
or whatever waits by the gate.
And those who know this are not sad
that light will go away like snow.
My soul, be whatever you want,
but be merciful too:
for here we come with life’s knapsack,
lingering by the exit:
and I see that all fear the road.
Yet you will like them, those two,
who occupy my word.
We may have lived long ago, yet
like water hollowing the riverbed
when we speak it is always to say:
Pray listen to the living!
So when I start my speech, it seems
I am forever catching
at the passing hemline of a cloak,
and I seem to be always saying, “farewell,
you may not know me, but hear this:
like all the rest, I love.”
And if all this is only death
and around me is only hell,
I’ll still be kneeling before those knees,
still won’t release my gaze.
And if I am to go on,
and close my eyes, forget my words,
unclench the hands of the mind,
that cloak will speak instead of me,
like my own blood inside.
And though I’ll lie—don’t interrupt:
for I know where I’m bound,
I know my hands are red with blood
and my heart lies underground.
But the light that was my very light,
and carried the third light high,
was the life of me, was the truth of me
and was more me than I.
SECOND INTRODUCTION
Where someone walks, someone looks
and thinks about him.
This look is open like a hollow
where a candle burns and waters flow
over a home that stands within.
Yet whoever decides that he’s alone
in truth knows nothing at all,
he’s not his own lord and master,
we’ll speak of him no more.
But it is strange how a deed
sinks into the depths below
and there it lives like Lancelot
watching time pass overhead—
