translated by Ben Belitt;
in "five decades: poems. 1925 - 1970." pg 286-289.
"That's how I am," I'll say, leaving this
pretext in writing: "This is really my life."
But everyone knows that's not how it happens at all.
Not only the cords in the net, but the air
that escapes the interstices matters:
the rest remains as it was: inapprehensible.
Time races by like a hare
in the February dew.
As to love -- love that unlimbers its haunches
leaving only a teaspoon of ashes
to say where the burning began --
the less said the better;
and the same for all mutable things: the man
who bided his time never doubting the outcome,
the woman who has lived out her time and will not come again--
all those who assume that, given the teeth in our head,
hands, feet and an alphabet,
life is only a matter of seeing things through with decorum.
One added the sum of his eyes and fixed it on history,
clutched the victorious past,
took perpetual being for his own
and devoted his whole life to
dying: emptied time of his living.
Earth was something to bury him with, in the end.
Yet that man was born with eyes
like the planets that fill the whole firmament.
The fires he summoned to devour the thing that he wanted
ate his lifetime away; he lived unappeased to the end.
But once in my life I saw plainly: one evening
in India; they were burning a woman
by the banks of a river, her bones and her body were burning:
I saw something move out of the burning sarcophagus
--call it smoke or a spirit--
till nothing was left of the fire or the woman
or the ash or the coffin. Evening had fallen.
There was night and the water, the dark
and the river, steadfast in that place and that dying.