ABOUT FOUNTAINS

Suddenly I know so much about fountains,

those incomprehensible trees of glass.

I could speak as though of my own tears,

which, in the grip of such fantastic dreaming,

I spilled lavishly and then forgot.

Did I forget that heaven extends hands

to many things and thrusts into our turmoil?

Did I not always see unrivaled greatness

in the rise of old parks before the prospect

of soft expectant evenings—in pale songs

that welled from unknown girls and ascended

through the melody until they overflowed

and became real, as if their shapes

must be reflected in the opened ponds?

I must only remember all those times

that fountains came alive in me, —

and I, too, feel the weight of the descent,

in which I saw the waters once again:

and can tell of branches that bent down,

of voices that burned with little flames,

of ponds, feebleminded and ineffectual,

that only repeated their sharp-edged banks;

of evening skies that from charred western forests

shrank back completely bewildered,

arched differently, darkened, and acted

as though this weren’t the world they had expected …

Did I forget that star next to star grows hard

and shuts itself against its neighbor globe?

That worlds in space only recognize each other

as though through tears? —Perhaps we are above,

worked into the heaven of other beings

who gaze toward us at evening. Maybe their

poets praise us. Maybe many of them

pray up toward us; maybe we are the goal

of strange curses that never reach us,

neighbors of a god whom they envision

far above, where we are, when they weep alone,

whom they believe in and yet lose,

and whose image, like a ray from their

searching lamps, fleeting and then gone,

passes across our scattered faces …