O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind.
Are not like birdsin unison migrating.
And overtaken,overdue, we thrust ourselves into the windand fall to earth into indifferent ponds.
Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one.
And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,in their magnificence, of any weakness.
But we, while wholly concentrating on one thing,already feel the pressure of another.
Hatred is our first response.
And lovers,are they not forever invading one another'sboundaries? -although they promised space,hunting and homeland.
Then, for a sketchdrawn at a moment's impulse, a ground of contrastis prepared, painfully, so that we may see.
For they are most exact with us.
We do not knowthe contours of our feelings.
We only know what shapes them from the outside.
Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart'scurtain?
It lifted and displayed the sceneryof departure.
Easy to understand.
The well-knowngarden swaying just a little.
Then came the dancer.
Not he!
Enough!
However lightly he pretends to move:he is just disguised, costumed, an ordinary manwho enters through the kitchen when coming home.
I will not have these half-filled human masks;better the puppet.
It at least is full.
I will endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire,the face that is nothing but appearance.
Here out frontI wait.
Even if the lights go down and I am told:"There's nothing more to come," -even ifthe grayish drafts of emptiness come drifting downfrom the deserted stage -even if not oneof my now silent forebears sits beside meany longer, not a woman, not even a boy-he with the brown and squinting eyes-:
I'll still remain.
For one can always watch.
Am I not right? You, to whom life would tasteso bitter,
Father, after you - for my sake -slipped of mine, that first muddy infusionof my necessity.
You kept on tasting,
Father,as I kept on growing, troubled by the aftertasteof my so strange a future as you kept searchingmy unfocused gaze -you who, so often sinceyou died, have been afraid for my well-being,within my deepest hope, relinquishing that calmness,the realms of equanimity such as the dead possessfor my so small fate -Am I not right?
And you, my parents, am I not right?
You who loved mefor that small beginning of my love for youfrom which I always shyly turned away, becausethe distance in your features grew, changed,even while I loved it, into cosmic spacewhere you no longer were…: and when I feelinclined to wait before the puppet stage, no,rather to stare at is so intensely that in the endto counter-balance my searching gaze, an angelhas to come as an actor, and begin manipulatingthe lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform.
Angel and puppet!
Now at last there is a play!
Then what we separate can come together by ourvery presence.
And only then the entire cycleof our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion.
Above, beyond us, the angel plays.
Look:must not the dying notice how unreal, how fullof pretense is all that we accomplish here, wherenothing is to be itself.
O hours of childhood,when behind each shape more that the past lay hidden,when that which lay before us was not the future.
We grew, of course, and sometimes were impatientin growing up, half for the sake of pleasing thosewith nothing left but their own grown-upness.
Yet, when alone, we entertained ourselveswith what alone endures, we would stand therein the infinite space that spans the world and toys,upon a place, which from the first beginninghad been prepared to serve a pure event.
Who shows a child just as it stands?
Who places himwithin his constellation, with the measuring-rodof distance in his hand.
Who makes his deathfrom gray bread that grows hard, -or leavesit there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the coreof a sweet apple?…….
The minds of murderersare easily comprehended.
But this: to contain death,the whole of death, even before life has begun,to hold it all so gently within oneself,and not be angry: that is indescribable.
