(Source: poetryfoundation.org)
(Source: theparisreview.org)
The rain is hammering on the car roofs.
The thunder rumbles. The traffic slows down.
Headlights are on in the middle of the summer day.
Smoke pours down chimneys.
All living things huddle, shut their eyes.
A movement inwards, feel life stronger.
The car is almost blind. He stops
lights a private fire and smokes
while the water swills long the windows.
Here on a forest road, winding and out of the way
near a lake with water lilies
and a long mountain that vanishes in the rain.
Up there lie piles of stones
from the Iron Age when this was a place
for tribal wars, a colder Congo
and the danger drove beasts and men together
to a murmuring refuge behind the walls,
behind thickets and stones on the hilltop.
A dark slope, someone moving
up clumsily with his shield on his back
- this he imagines while his car is standing.
It begins to lighten, he rolls down the window.
A bird flutes away to itself
in a thinning silent rain.
The lake surface is taut. The thunder-sky whispers
down through the water lilies to the mud.
The forest windows are slowly opening.
But the thunder strikes out from the stillness!
A deafening clap. And then a void
where the last drops fall.
In the silence he hears an answer coming.
From far away. A kind of coarse child’s voice.
It rises, a bellowing from the hill.
A roar of mingled notes.
A long-hoarse trumpet from the Iron Age.
Perhaps from inside himself.
What comes to me now is how I approached on the road a cage of rabbits. I was standing, contemplating them, their eagerness at the bars, when a man emerged from the house opposite, hay in hand. ‘Are the rabbits for eating?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re beautiful, no?’
From Patience (After Sebald)
I’ll lock myself now
in a cell of prickly hay
to think through all from the beginning
A leaf a root an ant a hare
the sea a cloud a rock
I’ll think about them
as a sinner thinks
about his sins
I’ll ask myself
whether I regret very much
not belonging to a land of green
I’ll question how many times
I didn’t ask roots which way to go
I’ll repent before water a cloud
a birch-tree
I’ll wash their feet
and dress ther wounds
Why can’t I be reconciled
to green rustling life
and sleep among mortal dreams
Leaf
teach me to fall
on the indifferent earth
Friedrich Holderlin, from ‘The Titans’ [Die Titanen], translated by Richard Sieburth.
