I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,–but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,–
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curied
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of…

the voices keep calling you
tormenting what passes for your soul
you know you must be leaving
but hang onto the day
days that run dawn to dusk
in a place you don’t belong
you try to kill that restless feeling
with responsibilities
obligations
with boundaries that bind
these things were tried before
this life you’ve lived before
and though you hear your name spoken
it is not the name you answer to
and there are voices on the wind
impossible to resist
this time there just isn’t much to hold you
and the names
the names you carry
send sorrow through the air
and the weight
the weight fills your lungs
and your mind
your perfect weapon
yearns to go down to the sea
and purify itself

the wind blows through rooms
it chills whoever sits there
shadows on the walls
frozen in time forever
like my heart now that you’re gone

She leans over me
the unknowing heart
to see if I love her
she is sure she forgets
under the clouds of her eyelids
her head falls asleep in my hands
where are we
together inseparable
living living
man and woman
my head rides in her dreams.

translated by Stuart Kendall

Thinking out
of the heart–

it’s up,
it’s down. . .

It’s that time
of day light

echoes the sun
setting west

over mountains.
I want to come home.

The clouds passing over, the
wisps still seeming substantial, as
a kid, as a kid I’d see them up there

in the town I grew up in on the hills
in the fields on the way home then
as now still up there, still up there.

It is worthless to write a line
if the song proceed not from the heart
nor can the song come from the heart
if there is no love in it.

Maligning fools, failing all else, brag,
but love does not spoil,
but countered by love, fills,
fulfilling grows firm.
A fool’s love is like verse poor in the making,
only appearances and the name having,
for it loves nothing except itself, can
take nothing of good,
corrupts the rhyme.

And their singing is not worth a dime
whose song comes not from the heart.
If love has not set his roots there
the song cannot put forth shoots there: so
my song is superior, for I turn to it
mouth eyes mind heart
and there is the joy of love in it.
And the binding glance is food for it
and the barter of sighs is food for it
and…