How much Sunday there was in the half-
discarded days—there and there, the flags
holding themselves ever more high,
stretching as if acclimatized
to the born landscape.
It had got too late for everything,
the lamp-yellow mirrors each contain
a different emptiness, smooth brown
in the eyes, the time of their first brilliance
sewn up like the sleeve stumps
of an armless man.
He makes his saints out of such things,
as if woven of fresh reed behind
this enduring: wide-open silver flowers,
hands that know how to sleep, that lie down
as if made of a single piece after all
that has passed, to rest for centuries
spread-open, starlike, dried flowers
as if in the wells of a paintbox.
With the lightness of a chime’s voice
she gives her consent to the seasons,
all their violet hues tucked in, as it were,
like certain evenings, to this calm,
almost velvet-like air
which is surely not easily introduced.
Red orifice facing the front,
its inward carmine a little more yielding:
will one no longer have to carry
its heaviness? It was calling, as it had been
calling throughout the weeks, all the time,
it needed one in order to feel itself.
The things placed upon it add their comments
with all their heart, each in its own way,
but there is still some other object
on the bare mantel, pushed up
against the white cloth …
This way it is ghostly, it is still the same
heaviness place by place, the windows,
smaller than they were, reduced
and completely in the wrong,
of this self-willed old city, holding its own,
between right and left. Hilly, like light music.