The Fifth Elegy 2007

dedicated to

Madame Hertha Koenig

THE FIFTH ELEGY

Pablo Picasso, Les Saltimbanques

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

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

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

V 4 never satisfied will. Instead it wrings them,

V 5 bends them, entwines them, and swings them,

V 6 tosses them and catches them back; as if out of oiled,

V 7 more slippery air they come down

V 8 on the depleted carpet, thinner

V 9 from their perpetual leaping, that lost

V 10 carpet in the universe.

V 11 Applied like a bandage, as if the suburb

V 12 sky had hurt the earth at that place.

V 13 And hardly thither,

V 14 upright, there, and revealed: “Disposing there’s”

V 15 beginning capital letter… already, too, the strongest

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

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

V 18 a pewter plate.

V 19 Ah and around this

V 20 centre, the rose of spectating:

V 21 blooms and loses its petals. Around this

V 22 pestle, the pistil brushed with its own

V 23 blooming pollen and fertilized again

V 24 To the false fruit of aversion,

V 25 never conscious, — gleaming with the thinnest

V 26 surface of vaguely, falsely smiling aversion.

V 27 There: the wilted, wrinkled weightlifter,

V 28 the old man now only drumming,

V 29 shrunken inside his gigantic skin, as if it had formerly

V 30 contained two men, and one of them

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

V 32 deaf and sometimes a little

V 33 bewildered inside his widowed skin.

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

V 35 and a nun: taut and brawny, filled

V 36 with muscles and simple-mindedness.

V 37 Oh you,

V 38 whom a sufferance that was still young

V 39 once received as a toy, during one of its

V 40 lengthy healings ... .

V 41 You who, with the impact

V 42 known only to fruit, unripe,

V 43 fall a hundred times daily from the tree of jointly

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

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

V 46 fall off and rebound from a grave:

V 47 sometimes, in a halfway pause, a loving

V 48 visage wants to arise on you over toward the seldom

V 49 tender mother; but to your body is lost,

V 50 used up by its surfaces, the shy

V 51 barely attempted face . . . And again

V 52 the man claps his hands for the leap, and before

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

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

V 55 precedes the pain, its origin, with a pair

V 56 of bodily tears, rapidly chased into your eyes.

V 57 And still, blindly,

V 58 the smile…

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

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

V 61 open to us; on a charming urn

V 62 celebrate it with a flowery, sweeping inscription:

V 63 “Subrisio Saltat.”

V 64 Then you, charming maid ,

V 65 you, by the most ravishing joys

V 66 mutely overleaped. Perhaps

V 67 your frills are happy for you —,

V 67 or across the young

V 69 taut breasts the green metallic silk

V 70 feels itself endlessly pampered and deprived of nothing.

V 71 You,

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

V 73 marketed fruit of indifference,

V 74 public among the shoulders.

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

V 76 where for a long time they were not yet adroit,

V 77 fell from each other like mounting, not rightly

V 78 mating animals: —

V 79 where the weights are still heavy;

V 80 where on their vainly

V 81 twirling sticks the plates

V 82 are still teetering…

V 83 And suddenly in this arduous nowhere, suddenly

V 84 the ineffable point where the pure too little

V 85 incomprehensibly transforms —, shifts

V 86 to that empty too much.

V 87 Where the many-place reckoning

V 88 amounts to the numberless.

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

V 90 where the fashion designer, Madame Lamort,

V 91 entwines and ravels the restless paths of the earth,

V 92 endless ribbons, and invents out of them

V 93 bows, trimmings, flowers, rosettes,

V 94 artificial fruits --, all

V 95 spuriously dyed, -- for the cheap

V 96 winter-hats of destiny.

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

V 97 Angel! It would be a place we don’t not know, and thereat,

V 98 on an inexpressible carpet, the lovers, who here

V 99 never master their skill, would reveal their bold

V 100 high-up figures of heart’s momentum,

V 101 their towers of desire;

V 102 where there never was ground, their ladders long

V 103 leaning on only each other, trembling, — and succeed

V 104 before the ring of spectators, the numberless, soundless dead:

V 105 Would these then toss their last — always hoarded saved,

V 106 always concealed, not known to us, eternally

V 107 valid — coins of happiness to the finally

V 108 palpably smiling couple on the satiated

V 109 carpet?

Click here to go to 2007 English Text of the Sixth Elegy

Click here to go to German Text of the Sixth Elegy

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