Like Orpheus I play
death on the strings of life,
and to the beauty of the Earth
and your eyes, which administer heaven,
I can only speak of darkness.
Don't forget that you also, suddenly,
on that morning when your camp
was still deep with dew, and a carnation
slept on your heart,
you saw the dark stream
race past you.
The string of silence,
taut on the pulse of blood,
I grasped your beating heart.
Your curls were transformed
into the shadow hair of night,
black flakes of darkness
buried your face.
And I don't belong to you.
Both of us mourn now.
But like the Orpheus I know
life on the side of death,
and the deepening blue
of your forever closed eye."
- Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann*, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, from Darkness Spoken: Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Brookline, MA, Zephyr Press: 2006.
Image: Gustave Dore - detail from Maenads In The Woods, 1879, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
*Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)
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