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