Where Grief Becomes Eternal

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’

Orders? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed

in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,

and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.

And so I grip myself and choke down that call note

of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to

in our need? Not Angels, not humans,

and the sly animals see at once

how little at home we are

in the interpreted world. That leaves us

some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned

day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street

and the coddled loyalty of an old habit

that liked it here, lingered, and never left.

O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace

gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,

desired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasks

for the single heart. It is easier on lovers?

Ah, they only use each other to mask their fates.

You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your arms

out into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds

will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight.

Yes, the Springs needed you. Many a star was waiting

for your eyes only. A wave swelled toward you

out of the past, or as you walked by the open window

a violin inside surrendered itself

to pure passion. All that was your charge.

But were you strong enough? Weren’t you always distracted

by expectation, as though each such moment

presaged a beloved’s coming? (But where would you keep her,

with all those big strange thoughts in you

going and coming and sometimes staying all night?)

No, in the grip of longing sing women who loved;

their prodigious feeling still lacks an undying fame.

The abandoned ones you almost envy, since you found them

so much deeper in love than those whom love allayed.

Begin ever anew their impossible praise.

Remember: the hero lives on, even his downfall

was only a pretext for attained existence: his ultimate birth.

But nature, exhausted, takes women in love

back into herself, as though she lacked strength

to create them a second time. Have you praised Gaspara Stampa

intently enough that any girl left by her lover

will be moved by this heightened instance

of a woman’s heart to cry out: Let me be as she was!

Isn’t it time these most ancient sorrows

at last bore fruit? Time we tenderly detached ourselves

from the loved one, and trembling, stood free:

the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string

to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Listen, my heart, the way

only saints have listened till now, as that vast call

lifted them from the ground; while they kept on kneeling

and noticed nothing, those impossible ones:

listeners fully absorbed. Not that you could bear

God’s voice—not at all. But listen to the wind’s breathing,

the unbroken news that takes shape out of silence.

It’s rustling toward you now from all the youthful dead.

When you entered a church in Rome or Naples,

didn’t their fate speak quietly to you?

Or an inscription echoed deep within you,

as, not long ago, that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.

Their charge to me?—that I gently dispel

the air of injustice that sometimes

hinders a little their spirits’ pure movement.

Granted, it’s strange to dwell on earth no more,

to cease observing customs barely learned,

not to give roses and other things of such promise

a meaning in some human future:

to stop being what one was in endlessly anxious hands,

and ignore even one’s own name like a broken toy.

Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,

to see all that was once so interconnected

drifting in space. And death exacts a labor,

a long finishing of things half-done, before

one has that feeling of eternity.—But the living

all make the same mistake: they distinguish too sharply.

Angels (it’s said) often don’t know whether they’re moving among

the living or the dead. The eternal current

sweeps all the ages with it through both kingdoms

forever and drowns their voices in both.

In the end, those torn from us early no longer need us:

slowly one becomes unaccustomed to earthly things,

in the gentle way one leaves a mother’s breast. But we, who need

such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress

springs from grief—: could we exist without them?

Is it a tale told in vain, that myth of lament for Linos,

in which a daring first music pierced the shell of numbness:

stunned Space, which an almost divine youth

had suddenly left forever; then, in that void, vibrations—

which for us now are rapture and solace and help.