late March
the gilded phalloi of the crocuses
are thrusting at the spring air
-- Ezra Pound
.
and is nowhere, and is endless
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
from "High Windows"
window-watching
Les fenêtres
XIII
Ce jour elle fut d'humeur fenestrière:
rien que de regarder lui semblait vivre.
Elle vit venir, d'inexistence ivre,
un monde à son coeur complémentaire.
On aurait dit que son regard arrose
abondamment un doux jardin d'images;
était-ce liberté ou esclavage
de ne pas changer l'indolente pose?
Son coeur, loin de ce qui vit et vire,
semblait un nombre qui soudain s'éclaire
pareil à la Balance ou la Lyre;
un presque-nom d'absences millénaires.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Windows
XIII
That day she was in a mood to window-watch;
to live seemed nothing but seeing.
She saw a world still dizzy from non-being
veer toward her, her heart‘s match.
One might have said that her gaze
watered a garden of images, abundantly.
Was it enslavement or liberty
in her unchanging, indolent daze?
Her heart, far from what lives and desires,
seemed a cipher in sudden incandescence
like the Scales or the Lyre --
an almost-name of ancient absence.
(my translation)
to beg
.... par la fatigue, le malheur, la mort, l’homme est fait matière et consommé par Dieu.
Simone Weil
La pesanteur et la grâce
.... through weariness, sorrow, death, man is made matter and consumed by God.
Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace
breath and the beating heart
Que je disparaisse afin que ces choses que je vois deviennent, du fait qu'elles ne seront plus choses que je vois, parfaitement belles.
Je ne désire nullement que ce monde créé ne me soit plus sensible, mais que ce ne soit plus à moi qu'il soit sensible. A moi, il ne peut dire son secret qui est trop haut. Que je parte, et le créateur et la créature échangeront leurs secrets.
Voir un paysage tel qu'il est quand je n'y suis pas...
Quand je suis quelque part, je souille le silence du ciel et de la terre par ma respiration et le battement de mon coeur.
Let me disappear so that these things I see should become, because they will no longer be things that I see, perfectly beautiful.
I desire not at all that this created world should be no more sensible to me, but that it no longer be to me that it is sensible. To me, it cannot say its too lofty secret. Let me part, and the creator and his creation will exchange their secrets.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there….
When I am somewhere, I sully the silence of the sky and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.
Simone Weil
La pesanteur et la grâce
The End of Winter
A crow stabs himself in a puddle
and dies in the broken water.
I learned that effacement is a duty.
Disappearing is yet hard
in this field stripped of green,
without even snow,
in silence and mud,
days when the pulse of her lost hands
beats in my throat, in my breath,
a fist of blood and fog.
.
wings
Under a picture
Swarming of ravens over a wheat billow.
Blue of which heaven? The higher? Neither?
Late arrow that the soul released.
Louder whirring. Nearer glow. This world and the other.
Paul Celan
Under a picture
I was too proud to say “the heart.”
Not anymore.
In the brown and gray of winter ending
a roil of birds over an empty field
shivers at once from chaos into a living tissue,
all dark resonance and unison,
one true thing, together.
Then chaos again.
It rends the heart
that waits here, too late for everything else.
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