Once I used to study languages dead for millennia,
Losing sleep over the other-worldly verbs:
My voice broke on the fall of a line-break
As it tried to keep up with night’s bolting car.
Once I was a confidante of midnight, a rival of day’s plain speaking,
I tried to curb my gestures and rein up sight:
But still I took a flame-red stallion to water
And I’d dive into his jet-black shade.
I shivered in fever heat as I walked onward,
Toward things that hated me—the coffin, the mausoleum,
The day of judgment. And the earth swam under my footstops
Slick as an ice floe on the deafening waters of spring.
Now my lips are set hard, and my eyes like paper:
So dry. Once a week, with my hand on an armchair’s spine,
I teach university students to write their verses,
Unhobble their rhythms, and close a thought with a rhyme,
Make the voice fly up en pointe, clean out the odd passage
That jangles—the sound of Anon filling in a lost line—
Bracketing earth-bound passion not metamorphosed
Into words, in the margins, I press down my pen.
So, with a glimpse of myself reflected—a demon
In the depths of a polished gold mirror—I ask no gift:
Put me in a closed coffin and burn me to ashes,
Or fix a dragons jaws to the top of a stake.
Translated by Catriona Kelly