The Double Dream of Spring (6 page)

At the moment when your life becomes a total shambles

You will have to resume your hopeless rambles

You have left everything behind and you still are eligible

And all alone, as the gulf becomes unbridgeable

You will have to earn your daily bread

Although you feel you’d be better off dead.

They’ll hurt you, and you’d like to put up some resistance

Because you know that your very existence

Depends on others as unworthy of you

As you are of God, and when it’s time to review

Your wrongs, you will feel no pain, they will seem like a joke

For you will have ceased to suffer under their yoke.

Whether you pass through fields, towns or across the sea

You will always retain your melancholy

And look after it; you will have to think of your career

Not live it, as in a game where the best player

Is he who forgets himself, and cannot say

What spurs him on, and makes him win the day.

When weary henceforth of wishing to gaze

At the sinuous path of your strung-out days

You return to the place where your stables used to tower

You will find nothing left but some fetid manure

Your steeds beneath other horsemen will have fled

To autumn’s far country, all rusted and red.

Like an ardent rose in the September sun

You will feel the flesh sag from your limbs, one by one,

Less of you than of a pruned rosebush will remain,

That spring lies in wait for, to clothe once again.

If you wish to love you won’t know whom to choose

There are none whose love you’d be sorry to lose

Not to love at all would be the better part

Lest another seize and confiscate your heart.

When evening descends on your deserted routes

You won’t be afraid and will say, “What boots

It to worry and fret? To rail at my luck?

Since time my actions like an apple will pluck.”

You would like of yourself to curtail certain features

That you dislike, making allowances for this creature,

Giving that other one a chance to show his fettle,

Confining yet another behind bars of metal:

That rebel will soon become an armèd titan.

Then let yourself love all that you take delight in

Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage

That shaped you and is passed on from age to age

Down to your entity. Remain mysterious;

Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.

The wave of heredity will not be denied:

Best, then, on a lover’s silken breast to abide

And be wafted by her to Nirvana’s blue shoals

Where the self is abolished and renounces its goals.

In you all things must live and procreate

Forget about the harvest and its sheaves of wheat

You are the harvest and not the reaper

And of your domain another is the keeper.

When you see the lapsed dreams that childhood invents

Salute your adolescence and fold their tents

Virginal, tall and slim beside the jasmine tree

An adorable girl is plaiting tenderly

The bouquet of love, which will stick in your memory

As the final vision and the final story.

Henceforth you will burn with lascivious fire

Accursèd passion will strum its lyre

At the charming crossroads where day is on the wane

As the curve of a hill dissolves in a plain.

The tacit beauty of the sacred plateau

Will be spoiled for you and you will never know

Henceforth the peace a pious heart bestows

To the soul its gentle sister in whom it echoes;

Anxiety will have called everything into question

And you will be tempted to the wildest actions.

Then let all fade at the edge of our days!

No God emerges to dream our destinies.

The days depart, only boredom does not retreat

It’s like a path that flies beneath one’s feet

Whose horizon shifts while as we trudge

The dust and mud stick to us and do not budge.

In vain do we speak, provoke actions or think,

We are prisoners of the world’s demented sink.

The soft enchantments of our years of innocence

Are harvested by accredited experience

Our fondest memories soon turn to poison

And only oblivion remains in season.

When, beside a window, one feels evening prevail

Who is there who can receive its slanting veil

And not regret day that bore it on its stream

Whether day was joy or under evil’s regime

Drawing us to the one and deploring the other

Regretting the departure of all our brothers

And all that made the day, including its stains.

Whoever you may be O man who complains

Not at your destiny, can you then doubt,

When the moment arrives for you to stretch out,

That remorse, a stinking jackal with subtle nose,

Will come at the end to devour your repose?

… Something gentle and something sad eftsoons

In the flanks of our pale and realistic noons

Holds with our soul a discourse without end

The curtain rises on the afternoon wind

Day sheds its leaves and now will soon be gone

And already my adulthood seems to mourn

Beside the reddish sunsets of the hollow vase

As gently it starts to deepen and slowly to increase.

Another feeble, wonderful creature is making the rounds again,

In this phraseology we become, as clouds like leaves

Fashion the internal structure of a season

From water into ice. Such an abstract can be

Dazed waking of the words with no memory of what happened before,

Waiting for the second click. We know them well enough now,

Forever, from living into them, tender, frivolous and puzzled

And we know that with them we will come out right.

But a new question poses itself:

Is it we who are being transformed?

The light in the hallway seems to indicate it

And the corrosive friends whose breath is so close

It whistles, are changed to tattered pretexts

As a sign, perhaps, that all’s well with us.

Yet the quiet bickering on the edge of morning

That advances to a steady drone by noon

And to hollow rumblings by night: is there so much good then

Blushing beyond the sense of it, standing straight up for others to view?

Is it not more likely that such straining and puffing

As commas produce, this ferment

We take as suddenly our present

Is our waltzing somewhere else, down toward the view

But holding off? The spiked neon answers it

Up against the charged black of a full sky:

“We thought you knew, brothers not ancestors;

Your time has come, has come to stay;

The sieved dark can tell you about it.”

All this time he had only been waiting,

Not even thinking, as many had supposed.

Now sleep wound down to him its promise of dazzling peace

And he stood up to assume that imagination.

There were others in the forest as close as he

To caring about the silent outcome, but they had gotten lost

In the shadows of dreams so that the external look

Of the nearby world had become confused with the cobwebs inside.

Yet all would finish at the end, or go undreamed of.

It was a solid light in which a man and woman could kiss

Yet dark and ambiguous as a cloakroom.

No noise was to underline the notion of its being.

Thus the thing grew heavy with the mere curve of being,

As a fruit ripens through the long summer before falling

Out of the idea of existence into the fact of being received,

As many another guest. And the helloes and goodbyes are never stilled;

They stay in the foreground and look back on it.

It was still possible of course to imagine that an era had ended,

Yet this time was marked also by new ideas of progress and decay.

The old ideals had been cast aside and people were restless for the new,

In a wholly different mass, so there was no joining,

Only separate blocks of achievement and opinion

With no relation to the conducive ether

Which surrounded everything like the clear idea of a ruler.

And it was that these finally flattened out or banded together

Through forgetting, into one contemporaneous sea

With no explanations to give. And the small enclave

Of worried continuing began again, putting forth antennae into the night.

How do we explain the harm, feeling

We are always the effortless discoverers of our career,

With each day digging the grave of tomorrow and at the same time

Preparing its own redemption, constantly living and dying?

How can we outsmart the sense of continuity

That eludes our steps as it prepares us

For ultimate wishful thinking once the mind has ended

Since this last thought both confines and uplifts us?

He was like a lion tracking its prey

Through days and nights, forgetful

In the delirium of arrangements.

The birds fly up out of the underbrush,

The evening swoons out of contaminated dawns,

And now whatever goes farther must be

Alien and healthy, for death is here and knowable.

Out of touch with the basic unhappiness

He shoots forward like a malignant star.

The edges of the journey are ragged.

Only the face of night begins to grow distinct

As the fainter stars call to each other and are lost.

Day re-creates his image like a snapshot:

The family and the guests are there,

The talking over there, only now it will never end.

And so cities are arranged, and oceans traversed,

And farms tilled with especial care.

This year again the corn has grown ripe and tall.

It is a perfect rebuttal of the argument. And Semele

Moves away, puzzled at the brown light above the fields.

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,

The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away

So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth

Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—

Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.

And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,

The presumed landscape and the dream of home

Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,

Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes

Became so extraneous and so near

To create a foreground of quiet knowledge

In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that

Will sign for old age

And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”;

The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:

Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.

During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent

Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that

The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,

Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike

In falsetto starlight like “purity”

Of design that had been the first danger sign

To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui!

How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,

The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting

The interior warmth? But land curdles the dismay in which it’s written

Bearing to a final point of folly and doom

The wisdom of these generations.

Look at what you’ve done to the landscape—

The ice cube, the olive—

There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things

Extending all the way along the river on both sides

With the end left for thoughts on construction

That are always turning to alps and thresholds

Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording

A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect

And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while

At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:

Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to

An impossible “calque” of reality, than

“The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,

A thing of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life

Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,

All in one direction.

You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,

What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal

Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.

But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning

There can be no further discussion.

And the river pursues its lonely course

With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape

For green brings unhappiness—
le vert porte malheur.

“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain

Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”

All this came to pass eons ago.

Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided

The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws:

A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,

An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.