Narcissus Speaks
O brothers! melancholy lilies, I languish in such beauty,
desiring myself in your nakedness,
and to you, Nymph, o Nymph of the fountains,
I come to give up my vain tears in silence, pure silence.
An infinite stillness hears me, where I listen to it expire.
The stream’s voice draws near and murmurs to me of evening;
I hear the silvered grass growing in the sacred shade,
and the malignant moon rises wraithlike, mirrowing.
Violating the frond of the tinted pool.
And me! among jetting reeds with all my heart
I languish, o sapphire! for my flawed and perfect beauty!
I have no love for anything but these enchanted waters
where laughter is forgotten, as is the homesick rose.
How I plead against the pure and fatal bruise of touch,
of dampness drawn from this fountain, drawn by me,
pursuing my eyes’ prey in the bound blue,
crowning my watered hair with a garland held behind my head.
Ah, that image is so weak and these cries sigh on forever.
Beyond the blue copse and the press of familiar arms,
a tendrilled glimmer of the ‘ambiguous hour’ winks,
and from the remnant of thin daylight shapes me a bedmate,
stripped on the bloodless spot where I haunt this lethal water ….
Delicious ariel, desirable and cold!
Here in the water my skin is lunar and fleshed out with reeds,
shape so shy before my eyes’ intensity.
Here are my arms, given over to the purity of silvery gestures …
In the enfolding gold my leaden hands delay
in summoning that captive, enlaced with leaves,
and I moan to hush-away echoes the names of ghostly gods … (gods!) …
Farewell, the reflection lost in the still, close wave,
Narcissus … the name itself so discreet and mild a perfume
upon the suave heart. Fallen from a shade’s hands
onto this empty death bed, a ghost rose shed.
Be, (my half-mouth), the rose-gartered kiss
that calls a spectral love to sleep,
for the night whispers near, while in the distance,
through the rushes filled with shadow and the sleep of failing daylight.
But the moon already flirts amid the stiff myrtle trees.
Your body is praised beneath these myrtles, oh my mirage
flowering in solitude, with grief in each ejaculation.
I peer, pooled in the dreaming woods, and admire
what is mirrored, mirror what is admired.
I strip and unlace myself, denuded of your fair presence,
the deceptive hour dampening the limbs grown stiff
in the lips of cupping moss,
while a dark ecstasy swells the rising wind.
Adieu Narcissus …. Die!
Here is the twilight.
My heart’s outrush is a sigh and my image wavers,
and the flute, friezed in the azure, sculpts a hush
of falling sighs, the breath softly pulled from the reeds.
But from the chill body lamped in moon,
mist still as mist, as yet unpillowed into the gathering tomb,
take mouth’s touch that flutes the fatal glass …
Desire, alone, enough to shatter the crystal.
Twined in a single breath: bed of pleasure, exile’s pallet,
and oh, how my breath enjoys the slender flute,
and the fingers which lightly reed forth my complaint …
Faint away, shivered, delirious god!
And you, timid and solitary flute,
spill for the moon a spray of our tears,
our spilled and silver tears.
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Canticle Of The Columns
Sweet, columns, with
daylight laureled and capped,
horned with birds, blood-breasted,
who wingwalk the tower,
sweet columns, oh
needles keyed and orchestral.
Each burns his silence
into the columns’ voices.
-What do you lift so high
in repetitious radiance?
-To pure unspoiled desire
our memorized elegance!
We chant the sung moment
that we lift the skies!
Oh sole wise voice
that serenades the eyes.
Attend the psalms’ release.
What sonority
our limpid elements
carve from the lucid.
So cold and golden,
we go mist-wrapped from our beds,
by chisel scissored,
these lilies to divine.
From our crystal beds
we rise through mist,
our shins glistered
in fog, like armor.
To savage the moon,
the moon and the sun,
we are polished, each
like a foot’s white nails.
Servants unable to kneel,
smiling though faceless,
that lovely one confronts us,
our legs bear her golden torso.
Cloistered and parallel,
the nose well-hooded
and our jeweled ears deaf
beneath a simplest cloth.
The temple of the eyes
is eternally darkened,
we go godless, to be made
divine in comrades!
Our gift of youth,
and youth’s flesh, beautiful
shadows, charms given form,
increasing our numbers!
Daughters of the golden ones,
upholding the laws of heaven,
a honey-colored god
falls upon us, into sleep.
Peacefully asleep, the day
that daily offers, stretched
on love’s low table,
new darkness for our crowns.
Uncorrupted sisters
half ember, half ash,
we excel in go-devil dances,
crumpling like dry leaves,
and, eternity times ten,
and the vanished ones, the gone,
a profound age ended,
ended and never attained!
Beneath our own loves,
heavier than all the world,
we run an odyssey of days,
patterned stone our breakers.
We go, gone and going through time
and our dazzling figures
step with steps for which there are no words,
and our steps trail us, fabled …
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The Friendly Woods
Side by side along the
path, our thoughts chaste.
Silently, hand in hand …
among the dark flowers;
a couple in love, walking
through the night meadow;
beneath the mad, amicable moon
we tasted fairy’s fruit.
Deep in the whispering wood,
still among the gentle shadows
we lay upon the moss;
and up there, in immense brightness
we find ourselves weeping,
o my darling companion of silence.