from Sonnets [1986]

If my slight Muse do please these curious days,

The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 38

I

That almost everything attains perfection

for just a little moment and then snuffs out

accords with both the world and Einstein’s theory.

And that people grow like plants


under a single polluted sky

and decay together equally in memory

is guaranteed by the selfsame time

that’s breathing down my neck.


That’s why I must now desperately

sing the praises of that one night

I saw you on display,


your youthful enchantment unparalleled,

a naked monument with full impunity,

toppling over before my sight.

III

I thought (I’m often such a swine):

I’ll wait until the winter comes

and carves its lines around her mouth,

or for deceitful spring to envy her


and dig deep trenches in the field of her skin,

then she, like me, will bear the signs.

But suddenly this fall arrived, hazy, bright,

confusing and as blessed as my late love


and you remained unharmed, my love.

I even dared to entertain the thought

that the cold inside of me might never reach you,


and that you will never leave my side,

in horror at my deep-freeze breath. I believed it.

The way a bleeding corpse might still believe.

XIII

Sometimes I pray for a speedy death,

knowing that things of value must always beg,

that follies flourish all around

and truth falls here on barren ground.


The missiles of a scandalous encampment

are celebrated.

The laws of a treacherous government

are decorated.


Virtue is exhausted.

Evil is the captain.

Adieu, my swamp of a land


I want to sink like a stone.

So why don’t I do it?

It is too soon to leave her here alone.

XIV

When the copper kettle with the ash

of what I was is shaken upside-down

above the patient grass, my love,

don’t stand there like a clown.


Wipe the mascara from your face

and think of the fingers that wrote these lines

in the days we ached for each other,

and stroked you when they were still alive.


And laugh at what I was, and don’t forget

the snoring in the cinema,

the underpants that kept on slipping down,


the stupid jokes and the lumbering gait

that always brought me back to you

to take you in your warm abundance.

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