Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi.
—CESARE PAVESE
People and things crowd in.
Eyes can be bruised and hurt
by people as well as things.
Better to live in the dark.
I sit on a wooden bench
watching the passersby—
sometimes whole families.
I am fed up with the light.
This is a winter month.
First on the calendar.
I shall begin to speak
when I’m fed up with the dark.
It’s time. I shall now begin.
It makes no difference with what.
Open mouth. It is better to speak,
although I can also be mute.
What then shall I talk about?
Shall I talk about nothingness?
Shall I talk about days, or nights?
Or people? No, only things,
since people will surely die.
All of them. As I shall.
All talk is barren trade.
A writing on the wind’s wall.
My blood is very cold—
its cold is more withering
than iced-to-the-bottom streams.
People are not my thing.
I hate the look of them.
Grafted to life’s great tree,
each face is firmly stuck
and cannot be torn free.
Something the mind abhors
shows in each face and form.
Something like flattery
of persons quite unknown.
Things are more pleasant. Their
outsides are neither good
nor evil. And their insides
reveal neither good nor bad.
The core of things is dry rot.
Dust. A wood borer. And
brittle moth-wings. Thin walls.
Uncomfortable to the hand.
Dust. When you switch lights on,
there’s nothing but dust to see.
That’s true even if the thing
is sealed up hermetically.
This ancient cabinet—
outside as well as in—
strangely reminds me of
Paris’s Notre Dame.
Everything’s dark within
it. Dust mop or bishop’s stole
can’t touch the dust of things.
Things themselves, as a rule,
don’t try to purge or tame
the dust of their own insides.
Dust is the flesh of time.
Time’s very flesh and blood.
Lately I often sleep
during the daytime. My
death, it would seem, is now
trying and testing me,
placing a mirror close
to my still-breathing lips,
seeing if I can stand
non-being in daylight.
I do not move. These two
thighs are like blocks of ice.
Branched veins show blue against
skin that is marble white.
Summing their angles up
as a surprise to us,
things drop away from man’s
world—a world made with words.
Things do not move, or stand.
That’s our delirium.
Each thing’s a space, beyond
which there can be no thing.
A thing can be battered, burned,
gutted, and broken up.
Thrown out. And yet the thing
never will yell, “Oh, fuck!”
A tree. Its shadow, and
earth, pierced by clinging roots.
Interlaced monograms.
Clay and a clutch of rocks.
Roots interweave and blend.
Stones have their private mass
which frees them from the bond
of normal rootedness.
This stone is fixed. One can’t
move it, or heave it out.
Tree shadows catch a man,
like a fish, in their net.
A thing. Its brown color. Its
blurry outline. Twilight.
Now there is nothing left.
Only a nature morte.
Death will come and will find
a body whose silent peace
will reflect death’s approach
like any woman’s face.
Scythe, skull, and skeleton—
an absurd pack of lies.
Rather: “Death, when it comes,
will have your own two eyes.”
Mary now speaks to Christ:
“Are you my son?—or God?
You are nailed to the cross.
Where lies my homeward road?
“Can I pass through my gate
not having understood:
Are you dead?—or alive?
Are you my son?—or God?”
Christ speaks to her in turn:
“Whether dead or alive,
woman, it’s all the same—
son or God, I am thine.”
1971
Translated by George L. Kline