Duino Elegies (9 page)

set up alongside their church bought to order:

clean and closed and woeful as a post office on Sunday.

Outside, though, there's always the billowing edge of the fair.

Swings of Freedom! High-divers and Jugglers of Zeal!

And the shooting gallery with its figures of idiot Happiness

which jump, quiver, and fall with a tinny ring

whenever some better marksman scores. Onward he lurches from cheers

to chance; for booths courting each curious taste

are drumming and barking. And then—for adults only—

a special show: how money breeds, its anatomy, not some charade:

money's genitals, everything, the whole act

from beginning to end—educational and guaranteed to make you

virile . . . . . . . .

.… Oh, but just beyond that,

behind the last of the billboards, plastered with signs for “Deathless,”

that bitter beer which tastes sweet to those drinking it

as long as they have fresh distractions to chew…,

just beyond those boards, just on the other side: things are
real.

Children play, lovers hold each other, off in the shadows,

pensive, on the meager grass, while dogs obey nature.

The youth is drawn farther on; perhaps he's fallen in love

with a young Lament . . . . . He pursues her, enters meadowland. She says:

“It's a long way. We live out there…”

                                                                  Where? And the youth follows.

Something in her bearing stirs him. Her shoulders, neck—,

perhaps she's of noble descent. Still, he leaves her, turns around,

glances back, waves … What's the use? She's a Lament.

Only the youthful dead, in the first state

of timeless equanimity, the phase of the unburdening,

follow her with loving steps. The girls

she waits for and befriends. Gently lets them see

the things that adorn her. Pearls of grief and the delicate

veils of suffrance. —When with young men

she walks on in silence.

Later, though, in the valley where they live, an older one, one of the elder Laments,

adopts the youth when he asks questions: —Long ago,

she says, we Laments were a powerful race. Our forefathers

worked the mines in those giant mountains; among humans

sometimes you'll find a fragment of polished primeval grief,

or, from an old volcano, a slag of petrified wrath.

Yes, it came from here. We used to be rich.—

And she guides him quietly through the wide landscape of Laments,

shows him the columns of temples, or the ruins

of those strongholds from which, long ago, Lament-Kings

wisely governed the land. Shows him the tall

trees of tears and the fields of flowering melancholy

(the living know them only as tender leaves):

shows him the animals of sorrow, grazing, —and sometimes

a bird startles, flies low through their lifted gazes, extends

into the distance the ancient glyph of its desolate cry.—

At evening she leads him out to the ancestral tombs

of the House of Lament, those of the sybils and the dire prophets.

But as night approaches, they move more slowly, until

suddenly, rising up moon-like, there appears: the great sepulchre

that watches over everything. Twin brother

to the one on the Nile, the exalted Sphinx—: visage

of the hidden chamber.

And they marvel at that kingly head, which silently,

for all time, has weighed the human face

in the stars' balance.

His sight can't grasp it, still unsteady

from recent death. But their gazing

flushes an owl out from behind
the corona's rim
. And the bird,

gliding with slow downstrokes along the cheek,

the one with the fullest curve,

inscribes faintly in the dead youth's new

sense of hearing, as across a doubly

unfolded page, the indescribable outline.

And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of the Land of Pain.

Slowly the Lament names them: “There, look—

the
Rider,
the
Staff,
and that constellation with so many stars

they call:
Calyx.
And then farther, toward the pole:

Cradle; Path; Puppet; Window; The Burning Book.

But in the southern sky, pure as if held in the palm

of a sacred hand: that clear, gleaming
M

that means Mothers . . . . . .”

But the dead youth must go on, and the elder Lament

leads him in silence as far as the wide ravine,

where they see shimmering in moonlight:

the Font of Joy. She names it

reverently, saying, “Among the living

it becomes a powerful stream.”

They stand at the foot of the range.

And she embraces him there, weeping.

He climbs on alone, into the mountains of primeval grief.

And no step rings back from that soundless fate.

 

 

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:

they might point to the catkins hanging

from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain

descending on black earth in early spring.—

And we, who always think of happiness

rising,
would feel the emotion

that almost baffles us

when a happy thing
falls.

NOTES

Preface

 

 

THE FIRST ELEGY