* * *
January 19 – February 4, 1937
Where is that chain-bound, nailed-up moan?
Where now Prometheus—the cliff’s support and subsidy?
And the raptor, where?—its yellow-eyed pursuit
Of talons flying out from under brow.
It will not be: the tragedies, we cannot bring them back.
But these fast-advancing lips—
These lips lead straight into what is the marrow
Of Aeschylus the porter, Sophocles the woodcutter.
It is the echo and hello, the milestone, no—the ploughshare.
The airy hewn-stone theater of expanding eras
Found its footing, and all crave to see all—
Those born, those doomed to die, those without death.
* * *
January 20, 1937
The way, somewhere, a sky stone wakes the earth,
Knowing no father, falls the fallen verse.
The inexorable—the artist’s revelation—
Can be no other, no one judges it.
* * *
January 21–22, 1937
I hear it clear, the early ice
Rustling under the bridges
And recall the bright hops,
How it floated over our heads.
From hardened stairs, from city squares
With their boxy palaces,
Alighieri sang the whole
Circle of his Florence
More fiercely with wearied lips.
And so my shadow gnaws
With its eyes that gritty granite
And sees at night a row of stumps
That in daytime seemed like houses.
My shadow, twiddling his thumbs,
Yawns a little in your company,
Or makes noise amid the crowd,
Basking in their wine and sky,
Feeding crumbs of bitter bread
To the ever-nagging swans.
* * *
February 1, 1937
This January, nowhere to go.
Wide open city, recklessly tenacious…
I’m drunk—what, from locked doors?
Driven to moans from all these locks and catches.
Barking alleys with their hanging socks,
Low cellars, mangled streets—
Hooligans hide hastily in nooks,
Dart out from every crook and cranny.
Toward the ice-encrusted water pump,
Slipping into a ditch, its warty crown,
And stumbling, I eat dead air,
And the rooks fly off in a fever.
Gasping after them, I screech
Into some frigid wooden box:
Bring me a Reader! Counsel! Doctor!
If only we could talk on this barbed stair!
* * *
February 4, 1937
Gone deep into this numbing time, like Rembrandt,
Martyr of the play of light and shadow,
The bite of my burning rib
Is guarded neither by those watchmen,
Nor the soldier, who sleep under the storm.
Will you forgive me, magnificent brother,
Master and father of the black-green crown—
But the eye in the falcon’s feather
And fiery chests by midnight in the harem
Disturb neither for good—nor with goodness—
With twilight’s bellows our agitated tribe.