Darkness Spoken

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.

At a time of year when new books are recommended to your attention, I want to suggest something not quite new but extraordinary: the poems of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)   Yes, her writing is often dense with layered  images and has often been described as  hermetic, but the poems offer their special pleasures to those who meet the author in them for the first time.