1977 Version of the Fifth Elegy

THE FIFTH ELEGY (1977)

dedicated to Madame Hertha Koenig

1 Who are they though, the wayfarers, those a little

2 more transient than we ourselves, who urgently, from an early age

3 are wrung by a (for whose sake, whose?)

4 never satisfied will that wrings them,

5 bends them, entwines them, and swings them around,

6 tosses them and retrieves them; as if out of oiled,

7 more slippery air they come down

8 on the worn-out carpet, thinner

9 from their perpetual leaping, that lost

10 carpet in the universe.

11 Applied like a bandage, as if the suburb‑

12 sky had hurt the earth at that place.

13 And hardly thither,

14 upright, there, and revealed: “Standing there”‘s

15 beginning capital letter… already, too, the strongest

16 of men are rolled again, as a joke, by the

17 always immanent grasp, like King August the Strong at table

18 rolling a pewter plate.

19 Ah and around this

20 center, the rose of spectating:

21 blooms and loses its petals. Around this

22 pestle, the pistil brushed with its own

23 blooming pollen and fertilized again

24 To the false fruit of aversion,

25 never conscious, — gleaming with the thinnest

26 surface of vaguely, falsely smiling aversion.

27 There: the wilted, wrinkled weightlifter,

28 the old man now only a drummer,

29 shrunken inside his powerful skin, as if it had formerly

30 contained two men, and one of them

31 were lying now in a churchyard and had been outlived by the other,

32 deaf and sometimes a little

33 confused inside his widowed skin.

34 But then the young one, the man as if he were the son of a neck

35 and a nun: taut and brawny, filled

36 with muscles and simple-mindedness.

37 Oh you,

38 whom a sufferance that was still young

39 once received as a toy, during one of its

40 lengthy recoveries ... .

41 You who, with the impact

42 known only to fruit, unripe,

43 fall a hundred times daily from the tree of jointly

44 constructed motion (a tree that, swifter than water, in a few

45 minutes goes through spring, summer, and autumn) —

46 fall off and strike a grave:

47 sometimes, in a halfway pause, a loving

48 visage wants to take shape on you over toward the seldom

49 tender mother; but to your body is lost,

50 used up by its surfaces, the shy

51 barely attempted face . . . And again

52 the man claps his hand for the leap, and before

53 a pain ever becomes more distinct in the vicinity of your always

54 trotting heart, the burning in the soles of the feet

55 anticipates the pain, its origin, with a pair

56 of bodily tears, rapidly chased into your eyes.

57 And still, blindly,

58 the smile.....

59 Angel! Oh take it, pluck it, the small-blossomed healing herb.

60 Create a vase, safeguard it! Place it among those joys not yet

61 open to us; on a charming urn

62 celebrate it with a flowery, dynamic inscription:

63 “Subrisio Saltat.”.

64 Then you, charming girl,

65 you, by the most ravishing joys

66 mutely overleaped. Perhaps

67 your frills are happy for you—,

67 or across the young

69 taut breasts the green metallic silk

70 feels itself endlessly pampered and deprived of nothing.

71 You,

72 poised in incessantly varying ways on all the wavering scales of balance,

73 the marketed fruit of indifference,

74 public among the shoulders.

75 Where, oh where is the place — I bear it in my heart —

76 where for a long time they were not yet skilled, still

77 fell from each other like mounting, not rightly

78 mating animals: —

79 where the weights are still heavy;

80 where on their uselessly

81 twirling sticks the plates

82 are still teetering…

83 And suddenly in this arduous nowhere, suddenly

84 the inexpressible point where the pure too little

85 incomprehensibly changes —, shifts

86 to that empty too much.

87 Where the many-place reckoning

88 results in the numberless.

89 Market places, oh place in Paris, endless showplace,

90 where the fashion designer, Madame Lamort,

91 entwines and ravels the restless paths of the earth,

92 endless ribbons, and invents out of them

93 bows, trimmings, flowers, rosettes, artificial fruits —, a

94 all spuriously dyed, — for the cheap

95 winter hats of fate.

....................

96 Angel! There would be a place that we do not know, and thereat,

97 on an inexpressible carpet, the lovers, who here

98 never master their skill, would reveal their bold

99 high-up figures of heart’s momentum,

100 their towers of lust,

101 where there never was any ground, their ladders long

102 leaning on only each other, trembling, — and succeed

103 before the ring of spectators, the innumerable, soundless dead:

104 Would the latter then toss their last — always saved,

105 always hidden, not known to us, eternally

106 valid — coins of happiness to the finally

107 genuinely smiling couple on the stilled

108 carpet?