Good Night
Matt Aucoin
Walking from where
eternity starts
eyes ahead
you circle it
how brief in noon did you bend to the eyeworn field washed with the dirt of sunlight, hold your breath as if to harden, ungleam, end into leaf, but you did not and sniffed the burngold air you stained, and passed on, leaving the field attentive, opener, as if it were suddenly the absence complementing a gone body and the snow starts shh
Fremd bin ich eingezogen,
Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus
A pace, a tread which says we will get nowhere but continue, a hymn living in the church of its tone, wandering, to fall exhausted into God’s lap
* *
Nun ist die Welt so trübe,
Der Weg gehüllt in Schnee.
* *
In the snow, in the woods, with not much moon, there are no shades of sound but terraces of it, precise as how glass shatters, and the wanderer’s steps, having been absent forever, speak. An overtone of the fact of this heartbeat is a melody like a faithful translation of past hope into the inevitable present pulse which goes nowhere and is true enough as to seem never to have started, always to have measured its minor syllable, a dragged foot long, through the snowreadied field which waited for it, the road like an abandoned attempt at exactly this. And the thought takes shape
Ich kann zu meiner Reise
Nicht wählen mit der Zeit
The way even this steamed mercuryline of song was long constructed by the cold, by the drying white throat of silence which oriented, at your steps, toward the hot black pupil of you. And what you give
words to had just
been said un-
-translated, I cannot
pick the time, then
you were propelled
up
to speak
Muß selbst den Weg mir weisen
In dieser Dunkelheit
But the way is already found and you sing to show the darkness a perfect darkness. Which does not lighten but keeps you a breath’s length from the world, where speech is. But farther, from the distance of music or the eye’s blackshone core, it is all unreal enough to be gray. But you find nothing. You dip yourself in brighter black so you will be lost and the same hand which mouths your words before you pour the hearthsmoke of breath into them will plot unfeeling the path you will feel.
Und auf den weißen Matten
Who hunted the deer whose tracks hunt and predict you
Was soll ich länger weilen,
Daß man mich trieb hinaus?
Here there is no away to be driven. For passing your hand through the tones around black as through shades of water you pass through black again, so that black comes to be only where you walk from and where, you keep remembering, you are going. The farmhouse is an accident, the gold of its eyes glancing away and going out, a face, did you call for it? You cannot fix its gaze.
That the modulation from minor to major is the most painful one. Achieved by wincing into surplus a pool which accumulated,
unnoticed,
to brimming,
nightlong. The listener’s face is loose, open, and the eyes blacken and wet to match the dark or breathe in it, the cheeks hang around the set jaw of the minor third. And it expands and the listener cracks into an
instant of
smile, that
shatter and
diminuendo
of ache, one streak
of exiled sunlight. How much he smiles through. The pool spills.
Will dich im Traum nicht stören,
War Schad an deiner Ruh
I could not disturb
your dreaming you will
not hear my steps
The door touches
the frame and makes dark and
I wake and start
wandering and
I write, above, good night, no, there is
no above night, I write
good night out of night’s
ink on night’s
fabric so you will know
I thought of you, no so
my breath pads the black