translated from the German by Mildred Faintly
Fortissimo
You played a passionate song,
I was afraid to ask what it was called
because I knew its name would say everything
that had flowed between us
slowly as molten lava.
Nature co-authored this romantic pantomime
of unspoken heart’s history.
The full moon laughed with her round fat face,
laughed light:
she was making us the heroes of a limerick.
Secret laughter shook our hearts’ bedrock
even though our eyes seemed to float in tears
of deepest feeling.
The colors of the patterned rug
glowed a rainbow.
We both felt it—the Turkish rug
became a hallucinatory lawn,
palm trees swayed above us in the breeze,
our blood raced to keep up with these changes.
Our desires broke over us both in a wave,
brought us down as would a beast of prey,
we sank to the soft-as-moss carpet
with cries like those of two dying gazelles.
Fallen Angel
for Saint Peter Hille
Your face is more than haloed
by such a smile as Jesus, the man, must have had.
Looking at you, my lips part,
hesitantly, like the petals
of a poisonous flower, consecrated to Satan,
shyly asking the spring wind about heaven.
The fires of desire, real as sunlight,
have tanned my skin dark;
meanwhile, the cold of desperation
has solidified my soul, made it hard as ice,
my inner atmosphere has given me
a conscience insensitive as steel.
Plants that can’t flower have grown, enclosing
my path, they lengthen
like the shadows of acts
of the kind that night invites. A blood-hot rain
drenches me in dreams, washing all things
into newness. Even sin seems clean.
Innocence lay in my bed and wept,
wrestled, then lamented, for my soul,
and finally departed, leaving on my pillow
a funeral wreath.
See this ring on my finger? A link of my chain.
Its gem, gleaming blue,
causes blindness. Maybe one of God’s disciples
lost it on a steep path in the hills of Galilee.
These garnets, like coals you can hold?
A gray-bearded Herod gave me those in payment
for my young nights. Touch them!
Still warm from my neck,
this red necklace, warm as a string of tears.
Sunset is telling the western sky
about how late roses have to fade
in autumn, when leaves are brittle
and branches are bare, and neither can remember
what a summer sun was—
like sluts they suffer in the end.
These late roses, according to the laws
they followed, the laws of amoral nature.
Now they offer their last perfume
as though that could warm a winter’s night.
If only I could walk beside you through the heights
where sight becomes horizon wide;
if only we could go,
hand in hand, like a pair of children,
at an hour when untamed stars slip down the evening sky,
to fall from the blue-black, like sinners evicted
from heaven, to shyly land
in a garden full of night-blooming orchids
and day-flowers, enthroned in golden sepals,
with their petals closed like lips
that know how to keep a secret.
My innocence, a great flower-like cloud,
hovers just above the slender trees
that frame this fairytale,
and the sweetest dreams of my childhood waken
at heaven’s golden doorway,
and when we pass at last into shut-eye country
the loveliest angel of all will implore
my salvation in the name of your love.