Knock,
Knock for ever.
In the threshold’s lure.
At the gate, which is sealed,
At the sentence, empty.
In the iron, —shaking
its eyeless wall.
In language, which is dark,
In this man, now silent,
This man you call
But who doesn’t rise.
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In the gathering, where
What
To rejoice in lacks.
In the grain of no shape
And the drying wine.
In the hand that keeps hold
Of an absent one.
In the uselessness
of remembering.
In writing, hastily
Garnered at night
And in these words, embers
Even before dawn.
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In the mouth that desires
Of another mouth
The honey no summer
Will ever ripen.
In the note that, sudden,
Intensifies,
Up to being, ice-walled,
Almost the way.
Then in the insistence
Of the muted note
That breaks its naked foam
Under the star.
In a star’s reflection
On steel.
In the anguish of bodies
That don’t unite.
Knock, late.
Lips desiring, even
When blood appears.
The hand still hammering,
Higher sound, when
The arm is nothing but
Ashes dispersed.
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Farther off than the dog
Into earth’s blackness
The ferryman throws himself, crying out,
Towards the other shore.
Mouth full of mud,
Eyes eaten,
Steer your boat for us all
Into matter.
What hole does the pole sound, you do not know,
What drift,
Nor what will light down there, benumbed with dark,
The book’s few words.
Farther off than the dog
Hardly covered over,
You are wrapped, ferryman,
In a cloak of signs.
You are spoken to, given
One or two keys, the vain
Map of another shore.
You listen, but your eyes are already
Bent on the obscure stream,
You listen, as they fall,
To the few spadefuls.
Father off than the dog
Who died yesterday,
They want to plant, sailor,
Your phosphorescence.
The hands of the young girls
Have pushed aside the earth
Under the plants that bear
The gold of future grains.
You could still tell their arms
Whose shadows are deep,
The swelling of their breasts
Beneath the tunic.
Laughing catches fire up there
But you move up.
You had been thrown, blood-stained,
Into the light,
You had opened your eyes, crying
The name of light,
But the word is not said when already
The drapery of blood
Falls over the light.
Laughing catches fire, up there,
It glows in the thickness
That darkens and crumbles.
Turn away from the fires
Of our shore.
Farther off than the fire
That had hardly caught,
Is placed the fire’s witness, the undeciphered,
On a bed of leaves.
Faces turned towards us,
Readers of signs,
What wind from the dark side, unheard,
Will make them rustle?
Which hesitating hands
As if discovering
Will take, and turn over,
The pages’ shadow?
Which meditating hands
Having could we say found?
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Oh, bend forward, give peace,
Light haze
Of the smile quivering
On the brightened face.
For the one who felt cold
So near the shore,
Be Pharaoh’s daughter
And her servants,
Those whom water, still dark
Before the day,
Would reflect, leaning on
Their red-clad shadow.
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And as a hand selects
Upon a table
The almost open grain
From the obscure tares
And taking it, is doubled
Through the wood’s dark water
By its reflection, where
The way appears,
Welcome, so they may sleep
Quiet in your voice,
Our words a wind was piercing
With endless squalls.
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Did you come here to drink some of this wine,
I forbid you to drink any of it.
Did you come here to understand this bread
Dark, as if burnt by my promise’s fire,
I forbid you to enter it with light.
Did you come here in order to, at least,
Be appeased by water, some lukewarm water, drunk
At the dead of a summer night after other lips,
Near the disordered bed upon the simple earth,
I forbid you to touch even the glass.
Did you come here for the child to glitter
High in the air over the flame that seals
Him in the April hour’s immortality
Where he may play, and you, where the bird alights
Amid the welcoming, the nameless grass,
I forbid you to raise your hands over the hearth of my power
without shadows.
Did you come here,
I forbid you to appear.
Do you ask,
I forbid you to know the name already half-said by your lips.
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Farther off than the stones
That the worker
Who stands upon the wall, tears out
Late into the night.
Farther off than the crow’s flank, signing
With rust the mist,
When it passes into the dream, its cry
Heavy with murky earth.
Farther off than summer
That the shovel breaks.
Farther off than the cry
In still another dream.
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Throws himself crying he
Who stands for us,
A shadow that we cast
Beyond all things.
And no unity but
This body’s fall,
When, all its sudden mass against the pole,
It forgets us.
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We, the words that tear up
An inner night
Since, if I come to you in the written words
The room is empty.
Is it “an other” the voice that answers us
Or me again? Beneath
The vault of the echo am I, multiplied,
Anything but
A noise among others
Torn from the vacant wall?
We
Among the noises,
We,
One of them.
Breaking away
From the wall that crumbles,
Widening out, the abyss
Where the abyss falls,
Swelling with the fullness of things remote
Through an effect
Of changing vibrations, in the network
Of monotonous causes.
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Look at this torrent,
It throws itself into the void of summer
And yet, motionless, is
The team of rearing horses
And the blind face.
Listen,
The echo’s not outside the noise but in the noise
Like its abyss.
The noise’s cliffs,
The crafters where the noise’s waters break,
The saxifrage,
All tear themselves away from your eyes with
An eagle’s cry, the end.
Where clashes the horses’ breast, rushes the water
Nobody knows,
But let yourself be carried, dazzled eye,
By the raucous wing.
We
Where the noises fuse,
We
Carried.
The predator
At its flight’s summit,
Crying,
Sends back upon, and lacerates, itself.
From the bosom the obscure beak has split
Pours the void.
At the Word’s summit still the noise,
In our work
The swell of noise at a higher degree.
But at the noise’s summit another light.
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All the visible, crippled,
Unwrites itself,
Embers, —sparks of the call
of other worlds,
When, in the hole of lightning, immobilized
Above the trees,
Bosom where Sleep and Death
Restlessly dream,
A tunic, half-opening,
The void welcomes
The farthest of the eye
In its naked joy.
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Utmost hour,
Cut off from all that, now,
Electric bulb
That kneels in silence
And burns,
Deviated, shaken,
By the darkness that has no summit.
I listen to you
Vibrating in the nothingness of the work
In progress throughout the world.
I perceive the stamping
Of beasts
Whose pasture is the burning bulb.
I take up the earth in handfuls
In that widening of the naked walls
Which is still fathomless, before the day,
I listen to you, I take
Out of your rope-basket
All the earth. Outside,
It’s still the time of grief, before
Any image.
In the hand outside, closed,
Has begun to sprout
The wheat of this world’s things.
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The ferryman
Who touches your shoulder with his thoughtful pole,
And you, the one
That night already shrouds
While your pole, but vainly,
Sounds the river’s bed,
Which one of you precedes, which has followed,
Who can have hope, give hope,
Leaning, see on the water
The upturned face
And the reflected fire
Upon your shoulder.
Translated by the author (1972)
