8.Birth

These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow.

The red hunter climbs down from the forest;

Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.

The peace of the mother: under black firs

The sleeping hands open by themselves

When the cold moon seems ready to fall.

The birth of man. Each night

Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;

The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,

Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room.

The eyes

Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.

The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles

The boy’s sleep with black wings,

With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple

clouds.

 

9.De Profundis

It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling.

It is a brown tree, that stands alone.

It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses.

How melancholy the evening is.

A while later,

The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn.

Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight

And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.

On the way home

The shepherd found the sweet body

Decayed in a bush of thorns.

I am a shadow far from darkening villages.

I drank the silence of God

Out of the stream in the trees.

Cold metal walks on my forehead.

Spiders search for my heart.

It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night, I found myself on a pasture,

Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.

In a hazel thicket

Angels of crystal rang out once more.

 

10.Descent and Defeat

To Karl Borromaus Heinrich

Over the white fishpond

The wild birds have blown away.

An icy wind drifts from our stars at evening.

Over our graves

The broken forehead of the night is bending.

Under the oaks we veer in a silver skiff.

The white walls of the city are always giving off

sound.

Under arching thorns

O my brother blind minute-hands we are climbing

toward midnight.

 

11.The Heart

The wild heart grew white in the forest;

Dark anxiety

Of death, as when the gold

Died in the grey cloud.

An evening in November.

A crowd of needy women stood at the bare gate

Of the slaughterhouse;

Rotten meat and guts fell

Into every basket;

Horrible food.

The blue dove of the evening

Brought no forgiveness.

The dark cry of trumpets

Travelled in the golden branches

Of the soaked elms,

A frayed flag

Smoking with blood,

To which a man listens

In wild despair.

All your days of nobility, buried

In that red evening!

Out of the dark entrance hall

The golden shape

Of the young girl steps

Surrounded by the pale moon,

The prince’s court of autumn,

Black fir trees broken

In the night’s storm,

The steep fortress.

O heart

Glittering above in the snowy cold.

 

12.In Venice

Silence in the rented room.

The candlestick flickers with silver light

Before the singing breath

Of the lonely man;

Enchanted rosecloud.

Black swarms of flies

Darken the stony space,

And the head of the man who has no home

Is numb from the agony

Of the golden day.

The motionless sea grows dark.

Star and black voyages

Vanished on the canal.

Child, your sickly smile

Followed me softly in my sleep.

 

13.The Mood of Depression

You dark mouth inside me,

You are strong, shape

Composed of autumn cloud,

And golden evening stillness;

In the shadows thrown

By the broken pine trees

A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;

A little town

That piously dies away into brown pictures.

Now the black horses rear

In the foggy pasture.

I think of soldiers!

Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers,

The laughing blood plunges,

Speechless

Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression

Of an army; a blazing steel helmet

Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads.

The autumn night comes down so coolly.

With her white habit glittering like the stars

Over the broken human bodies

The convent nurse is silent.