Should I say that you’re dead?
You touched so brief a fragment
of time. There’s much that’s sad in
the joke God played.
I scarcely comprehend
the words “you’ve lived”; the date of
your birth and when you faded
in my cupped hand
and one, and not two dates.
Thus calculated,
your term is, simply stated,
less than a day.
It’s clear that days for us
are nothings, zeros.
They can’t be pinned down near us
to feed our eyes.
Whenever days stand stark
against white borders,
since they possess no bodies,
they leave no mark.
They are like you. That is,
each butterfly’s small plumage
is one day’s shrunken image—
a tenth its size.
Should I say that, somehow,
you lack all being?
What, then, are my hands feeling
that’s so like you?
Such colors can’t be drawn
from nonexistence.
Tell me, at whose insistence
were yours laid on?
Since I’m a mumbling heap
of words, not pigments,
how could your hues be fragments
of my conceit?
There are, on your small wings,
black spots and splashes—
like eyes, birds, girls, eyelashes.
But of what things
are you the airy norm?
What bits of faces,
what broken times and places
shine through your form?
As for your nature mortes;
do they show dishes
of fruits and flowers, or fishes
displayed on boards?
Perhaps a landscape smokes
among your ashes,
and with thick reading glasses
I’ll scan its slopes—
its beaches, dancers, nymphs.
Is it as bright as
the day, or dark as night is?
And could one glimpse—
ascending that sky’s screen—
some blazing lantern?
And tell me, please, what pattern
inspired this scene?
It seems to me you are
a protean creature,
whose markings mask a feature
of face, or stone, or star.
Who was the jeweler,
brow uncontracted,
who from our world extracted
your miniature—
a world where madness brings
us low, and lower,
where we are things, while you are
the thought of things?
Why were these lovely shapes
and colors given
for your one day of life in
this land of lakes?
—a land whose dappled mir-
rors have one merit:
reflecting space, they store it.
Such brief existence tore
away your chance
to be captured, delivered,
within cupped hands to quiver—
the hunter’s eye entrance.
You shun every response—
but not from shyness
or wickedness or slyness,
and not because
you’re dead. Dead or alive,
to God’s least creature
is given voice for speech, or
for song—a sign
that it has found a way
to bind together,
and stretch life’s limits, whether
an hour or day.
But you lack even this:
the means to utter
a word. Yet, probe the matter;
it’s better thus.
You’re not in heaven’s debt,
on heaven’s ledger.
It’s not a curse, I pledge you,
that your small weight
and span rob you of tongue.
Sound’s burden, too, is grievous.
And you’re more speechless,
less fleshed, than time.
Living too brief an hour
for fear or trembling,
you spin, motelike, ascending
above this bed of flowers,
beyond the prison space
where past and future
combine to break, or batter,
our lives, and thus
when your path leads you far
to open meadows,
your pulsing wings bring shadows
and shapes to air.
So, too, the sliding pen
which inks a surface
has no sense of the purpose
of any line
or that the whole will end
as an amalgam
of heresy and wisdom;
it therefore trusts the hand
whose silent speech incites
fingers to throbbing—
whose spasm reaps no pollen,
but eases hearts.
Such beauty, set beside
so brief a season,
suggests to our stunned reason
this bleak surmise:
the world was made to hold
no end or telos,
and if—as some would tell us—
there is a goal,
it’s not ourselves.
No butterfly collector
can trap light or detect where
the darkness dwells.
Should I bid you farewell
as to a day that’s over?
Men’s memories may wither,
grow thin, and fall
like hair. The trouble is,
behind their backs are:
not double beds for lovers,
hard sleep, the past,
or days in shrinking files
backstretched—but, rather,
huge clouds, circling together,
of butterflies.
You’re better than No-thing.
That is, you’re nearer,
more reachable, and clearer.
Yet you’re akin
to nothingness—
like it, you’re wholly empty.
And if, in your life’s venture,
No-thing takes flesh,
that flesh will die.
Yet while you live you offer
a frail and shifting buffer,
dividing it from me.
1973 • Translated by George L. Kline