Читать книгу Introducing Irony: A Book of Poetic Short Stories and Poems - Maxwell Bodenheim - Страница 10

Table of Contents

You can write nothing new about death

GEROID LATOUR

DEATH,

Grandiosely hackneyed subject,

I live in a house one hundred years old

Placed in the middle of a cemetery.

The cemetery is bothered by mausoleums

Where fragments of Greek and Gothic

Lie in orderly shame.

Slabs and crosses of stone

Remain unacquainted with the bones

That they must strive to introduce.

The trees retain their guiltless sibilants.

The trees tell me upon my morning walk:

“In other cemeteries,

Shakespeare, Maeterlinck and Shaw

Fail to produce the slightest awe

In trees that do not create for an audience.”

Being finalities, the grass and trees

Find no need for rules of etiquette.

Delicacy must be effortless

Or else it changes to a patched-up dress.

But delicate and coarse are words

For quickness that tries to linger,

And slowness that strives to be fast!

Emotions and thoughts are merely

The improvisations of motion,

And lack a permanent content.

An aging tree is wiser

Than an aging poet,

And death is wiser than both.

The scale ascends out of sight

And I recall that the morning is light

And smaller notes await me.

The tomb-stones around my path

Have been crisply visited by names

To which they bear no relation.

Imagine the perturbation

Of a stone removed

From the comprehension of a mountain

And branded with the name of A. Rozinsky!

Recollecting journeys of my own,

I close my eyes and leave the stone.

The names of other men entreat—

Slight variations in line

Ponderously refusing to resign.

Men who will be forgotten

Try to hinder the process with stone.

Because they dread the affirmation

Of ashes undiscovered in wind,

I am walking through this cemetery.

The old grave-diggers will soon

Astonish the earth below this oak.

From their faces adjectives have fled,

Leaving the essential noun:

Leaving also the unwilling frown

With which they parley with the earth ...

Death, I must tell you of these things

Since you are unaware that they exist.

You send an efficient servant

To the almost unseen fluctuations

Of tomb-stones, skulls, and lilies,

Reserving your eyes for larger games.