1

The rain is speaking quietly,
you can sleep now.

 

 I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,

Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving
(I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth.
For only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently

You who never arrived
in my arms, beloved, who were lost
from the start,

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most
intimate. From images that are full, the spirit’s
stream plunges down to others that suddenly must be filled;

Often I gazed at you in wonder: stood at the window begun
the day before, stood and gazed at you in wonder. As yet the new town
seemed denied to me, and the unpersuaded landscape kept darkening

There stands death, a bluish distillate
in a cup without a saucer. Such a strange
place to find a cup: standing on

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied

World was in the face of the beloved.
Suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world cannot be grasped.

Oh the losses into the All, Marina, the stars that are falling!
We can’t make it larger, wherever we fling ourselves, to whatever
star we may go! In the Whole, all things are already numbered.

Oh tear-filled one who, like a sky held back,
grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.
And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,

Little Tear-Vase

Other vessels hold wine, other vessels hold oil
inside the hollowed-out vault circumscribed by their clay.
I, as a smaller measure, and as the slimmest of all,