Quoted in Lou Salome’s You Alone Are Real to Me:

I stand as if blind and in total darkness
because my look no longer finds its way to you.
The mad rush of days is
only a curtain, behind which you exist.
I stare up to see if it is not lifted,
the curtain behind which my life lives.
My life’s strength, my life’s necessity
and yet: my death.

Neither am I the two dark seas,
Nor the sinuous strait.
Neither can I drown in the current
Nor run aground on the high jagged cliffs.

I thought once that I was a navigator.
But the sextant moves eerily upright as if guided
By the hand of some phantom or ghost.

—Me, July 2016

From Duino Elegies, First Elegy:

Voices, voices. Listen, my heart, as before now
only saints had listened, while that vast call
raised them off the ground; yet they paid no heed
and kept kneeling, those impossible ones,
listening wholly absorbed. Not that you could bear
God’s voice—by no means. But listen to the wind’s breathing,
that uninterrupted news that forms from silence.

Inside the drum.
Lost in labrinthine halls.
Lost in deafening slumber.
If only you could hear the East wind call.

Hush …

The current will carry my song over the savanna
If I trust as an animal might of its mother.
Why disturb the breath supernal with muddled thoughts?

—Me, July 2016