My fingers stroke my brow and search there
for rhymes which, one day, with their bite, will eat into
my flesh; stroke my brow, skeletal fingers, there
already are my veins, like a bluish bruise,
they circle strangely, my poor weary fingers –
and how those long sickly nails beat
ominously against my temples, tolling,
tolling, my slow and mournful fingers!
You touch what will be verse, my opal fingers,
verse which will, at the graveyard’s witching hour,
sluggishly devour my pale brain,
verse which will devour my dreary boredom
my dreary dreams right up to the thought
which at that hour slowly bends my brow
upon this paper, whose whiteness, wounded with ink,
tenses with the lines of my harsh writing.
And you too, my fingers, you’ll be verse
after the sacraments and forgiveness,
my fingers, when you are stilled and turn green
under the shroud, laid upon my breast, like wires;
my fingers, writing to me this rough winter night,
when you’re knotted – all ten – on my carcass
crushed there beneath a casket of iron,
this bitter carcass, already broken.