in the faces of pregnant women?
They do not notice it (how could they
notice) in their swirling return to themselves.
Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night
air.
For it seems that everything hides us.
Look: trees do exist; the
houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive
as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of
shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.
You hold
each other. Where is your proof?
Look, sometimes I find that my hands have
become aware of each other,
or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.
That gives me a
slight sensation.
But who would dare to exist, just for that?
You, though,
who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you:
"No
more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance,
like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly
emerged:
I am asking you about us.
I know, you touch so blissfully
because the caress preserves,
because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;
because underneath it you feel pure duration.
So you promise eternity,
almost, from the embrace.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of the
first glances,
the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through
the garden:
lovers, are you the same?
When you lift yourselves up to each
other's mouth and your lips join,
drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his
action.
Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic
gravestones?
Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders
that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?
Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the
torsos.
These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far,
this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down
harder upon us.
But that is the gods' affair."
If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,
our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.
Four our own
heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it,
gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,
measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.
Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992
Translated by Stephen Mitchell