These poems are taken from Mildred Faintly’s just-published translation of the book, available from our bookstore here.
Evensong
(for my little sister)
Place your little hand in mine,
I’m here with you, right beside,
never will I leave you lonely,
just your shadow’s company,
you can always count on me.
Evening slowly tucks its colored
covers ’round the drowsy sun,
clouds have gone to bed now, hid
snug behind our house, in field
nodding flowers close their petaled
eyes and, rocked by breeze, they sleep.
Glimmering stars begin to show,
wind against the window blows,
evening’s angel shades the world,
sable winged, takes up the moon,
plays with it, a pale balloon,
sends it slowly drifting, high
right across the night-time sky.
Listen, how the tree-leaves whisper,
let those heavy eyelids sink,
you’re my child, rest is sweet,
be it blessed with pretty dreams.
Homesick for a Small Town
Sometimes I wish I lived
in a tiny town, its buildings clustered
around a market square paved with cobblestones
that reechoed every footstep
crossing them in the quiet of night—
in front of the town hall, a cast-iron fountain,
somewhat beset by rust, done in a style
dead for a century, with lion heads or dolphins
spitting thin arcs of glittering liquid
into basins with a shrill and half-heard splash.
Of course there’s an eighteenth century statue
in bronze, looking on indulgently
as lovers walk by at dusk hand in hand.
A town with old courtyards, forgotten, undiscovered,
otherworldly as grottoes seen in a dream—
somewhere in the distance someone’s dachshund barks,
blond children are playing under the trees.
Geraniums, tulips, narcissus, bloom
in little window boxes that give the houses
and oddly diminutive dollhouse look.
Under a red-tiled gable roof
someone’s hung out a brightly checkered quilt to air
like a folk-art heraldic banner.
Everyone has time here, no one’s in a hurry,
it’s as if history itself,
even the present breathless century,
stopped here to take a break.
Here people still sit on benches
in front of their houses, lean back against the wall
and puff on lidded hunter’s pipes,
like tiny improbable smoking saxophones,
with running stags carved in deep relief
wrapped around the bowls like netsuke
from old Bavaria! And if it’s solitude you want,
that’s just a stroll away.
The nights are calm and still as pools,
and like calm still pools, they’re clear to their depths.
When you look up, the stars seem incredibly close.
The gas lamps fade to spectral yellow
will o’ the wisps, when the moon,
very much at home in our midst,
fills the street with light
like friendly impalpable laughter.
Here where the world is quiet, here
all trouble seems smoothed, not worth a thought
or a mention, here in such a good old
wondrous little town.
Days Left Blank
There are days left blank in the calendar,
empty numbered boxes, colorless, dull,
washed-out days, that pile up
in the quiet of the night,
wall-high, inescapable, gray,
every hour fits in its brick,
seals the ache of empty days
in a prison house of time.
Dreams approach
and melt away
like the ghosts they are
at break of day,
timidly we reach for their fragments,
irrecoverable colors,
lost to memory as to eye,
then, in the shadow of colorless days
we manage to live because we didn’t
manage to die.
Anxiety Dream
At first, I was walking, naked in broad daylight,
through a long pillared lobby (what would Dr. Freud
make of that?)—then, still in the dream—
I fell out of bed
and realized I’d forgotten my math book
and couldn’t remember the subjunctive mood.
The school nurse was a microphone announcing
through the P.A. system that, as a punishment,
I had to eat oatmeal.
Now I needed to climb a steep flight of stairs
at the top of which stood a man with the initials
“C. V.” —for curriculum vitae?
He looked pretty good, way up there,
and grinned as if to say, “I’ll show you!”
Then I must add up ten columns of figures,
but they always work out to a telephone number
I almost recognized: the area code
was from somewhere in Hesse,
where they make such good wine.
Then I lay helpless in a hospital again,
on my chart it said something about kidneys.
Next thing I knew I was dead,
which was terribly sad,
even for a dream. My friends had planted
a tree by my grave, and ten cops sang
“You have the right to remain silent,”
—out of respect for the dead, I suppose.
At this point, even I realized
this had to be a dream, and woke up for real,
wondering how interpret all that.
Then I saw by the clock, which read “nine o’clock,”
that what it meant was—late for work.
Relatives
(snapshots that won’t go in the family album)
Relatives are like springtime,
one day, all of a sudden, they’re there!
Yet, when it comes to consistency,
nothing even approaches them.
Whenever you think, “No!”
they tell you yes.
Family is God-ordained,
your kin are heaven’s gift,
and one that usually comes in twos,
matched pairs: when Auntie Lisa sulks
Uncle Fritz is offended too.
Relatives exist to make suggestions,
how your way of life could be improved.
You lack, for example, all decent feeling
for family gatherings, but get all heated up
for politics as though it were
a competitive sport.
Relatives know the latest family gossip,
first, and first hand—they have the time.
From now until eternity,
family’s forever.
Does that thought make you uncomfortable,
you cold selfish thing!
Don’t suppose that we don’t know
what goes on in that mind of yours:
we’re you’re own flesh and blood,
we have
our finger on your pulse.