Your whole life is a parallelogram
without bisectors.
A superannuated schoolboy
brought you daffodils,
and spring-flower reveries
revived in you.
You smoke, not changing position
in an official armchair.
The lime-tree breathes its bribe of honey
into existence through a hotel window
like the venom of fame
—or a life without limits.
I am the reflection of every mirror-
like, living and unliving,
animate and inanimate thing:
brooks and basin-taps,
paradisal wings and infernal
polished relics.
I reflect like the lid of a grand piano,
like a negative,
and my universal sorrows
scarcely belong to me.
They are only a reflected myth.
In this there would be no drama
if I could crawl out
of the annular iambic pit
where there are no reverses
or angles, and amalgams of Spring
blur the surface of the glass.
How can one know
who is reflected into the world
and if this reflects well or badly
into your heart?
Try hard not to look
at anything that shines:
not foil nor tin nor copper,
not even into the mirror
hanging here, where life
exists like a heart grown quiet,
where all my verses
come now to die.
Translated by Ruth Fainlight