For beauty is much stronger than our hearts.
It is a fortune-teller’s cup—
the most translucent vessel for the incredible.
8. THE KING AT THE HUNT
My horse where art thou taking me?
Take me wherever thou will.
My soul is armored safe,
and life is ever free
to rule over itself
and hunt with fierce dogs,
to make cures with eastern potions,
or deal out maladies,
to feed itself in secret
on bears’ and foxes’ milk,
or lie between two lovers
like an old, unblemished sword.
And if—most strange and distant dream—
she stands before me pure?
Not that she is faithful, but because
you can’t exhaust
the depths,
can’t comprehend
the heights;
whoever’s gone beyond Hades’s gates
will never come back, at least
that’s what they say.
O, woman’s will is rude and coarse,
she has no fear, she is
an unrelenting slave . . .
Deer,
my friend,
run on, if it be fate
for you to escape . . .
Yes, rude and coarse and knows
everything once and for all.
Weakening, meanwhile—
that is our handiwork.
9. A DWARF TELLS FORTUNES BY THE STARS
(and also about leprosy)
O leprosy, all ancient horror
can fit into this one thing alone.
Immortality itself seems to sink
like a stone at the very sight of it:
can the heavens cause such offense
that a man will hate another man
as he does his own death?
Yet evil which no eye can see
is more abysmal than leprosy.
The worthiest man visits lepers
and cleans their wounds with tender hands
and serves them as a miser does his gold:
they’re bounty for such holy hearts.
And he carries their shame with him,
as the ocean carries a hollow canoe,
and rocks,
and shifts, and moves around,
and does as God has bid . . .
But who will help one who is wicked,
when he gnaws at another’s life
like a dog with a stolen bone?
Why does he understand the stars?
They fall to pieces, part, divide.
All love this clustering—but not him.
He is like a nail driven into himself.
Who digs such nails out?
Who’ll bring him medicine and sit
at his bedside? Who is
the doctor that will, without revulsion,
treat his guile and envy?
Maybe shame alone—
and the dwarf too knows this.
He pushes away each constellation
and asks for retaliation.
(The evil once done by us,
now, with the same secret lust
it always grew on, feeds
on self-immolation):
“I am, but may I be made
like something not yet made,
and you will read the pure light of suffering
in me, just as I read the stars!”
And he broke free from the deepest dark
to a new and different sky,
from the gloom that would but growl and bark,
being what it was: himself, his I.
10. NIGHT
Tristan and Isolde meet a hermit in the woods
Love, hunter of hearts,
is tightening its bow,
how oft it seemed to me
that life’s but a short sound:
it is like a worn sack
stuffed with fiery groats,
and a narrowing aim.
Through a hedge of roses reaching its hands again,
a story most beautiful nurtures such pain
whose sweetness is unrivaled: a weighty almandine
is rolling through the leaves, alone and not alone.
What excites our mind beyond its very limits?
That which promises the thing our mind prohibits:
the soul runs from itself and sees an example in you—
o never-resting Ahasver, the ever-wandering Jew.
Hiding from my one and only solace,
from the blood on the thorns of a mysterious fence:
it’s not pleasure I want: such things my mind ignores,
like that Eternal Jew, demanding something more . . .
But here we have a story where for all time
fateful pain is rustling, like an ancient lime.
With Mistress Death hidden under leaf
their vast night grows from day’s wreath,
it grows and says that life is not enough—
life longs for more and grips itself above
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