A MESSAGE FOR T.

in the grasses of life

I’m such a child at heart

that I believe: the constellation Sagittarius

isn’t pointing its arrow at me

From early poems

It was long ago that I left that tree

at home, behind which the sun

set for me. Maybe you will want

to go back there: to the room and the window

with a good view of it; maybe you will want

to return to it when your fatigue dissipates . . .

Behind it—there was a mine full of sun

in which, as if in a furnace,

there slowly shaped, melded,

and blended in boiling gold

gigantic orbs of sunlight—

on every God-given day of my life . . .

Now there is—yarrow—

bow to it for me, to its waving stalks—greet

its waving with a wave and ask

about the snails (they are each alike—

a snail Gundertwasser: their belfries

without any bells in them ring out loudly . . . )

Visit them, hand them some small

things from me: this bit of lime

I brought from Hellas for them . . . . .

Aside from that,

I also ask—that you bow

to the gray turtledove for me: she

lives in luxury at the very peak,

of a house surrounded by an earthen bench, beyond its threshold

a heavenly field filled with the sun and God.

(By the way, don’t alarm my turtledove

for I failed to get a gift for her—

what gift is appropriate for turtle doves?)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Listen

what a long mysterious song

emerges from the throat of the turtledove

as it coos and calls in the night: as if the Lord himself

is blowing into a clay cuckoo . . .

Go there, when it grows dark,

stand on the hill: you’ll see—it glimmers,

there, way down below . . . like a phosphorescent map,

scattered in a ravine . . . some sort of cosmic symbols . . .

like children’s dreams . . . . Fireflies light their souls

on boughs of yarrow.

This—is reading meant for angels; personages,

that we will sometime be able to attain from heaven

but into us—those that are here—something else will flow

that, which destroys all of our secrets

and distant memories, something quiet and precious

that has flown here for hundreds of years,

where a firefly is still a firefly,

and a turtledove—is still a turtledove, and a snail

is still a snail. . . . And no further description

is needed.

Don’t return from there . . .

Translated by Olena Jennings