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 …