Weary of bitter rest where my failure to act
insults a fame for which I once fled from the dear
childhood of rose woods thriving under nature's sheer
blue, and still wearier seven times of my grim pact
to carve out nightly some new grave in the terrain
that lies penurious and cold within my brain
a pitiless gravedigger of sterility---
what shall I tell the dawn, as roses visit me
O dreams, when the immense cemetery imposes
unity on the void holes, fearing its livid roses?
I want to leave the ravenous Art of cruel lands
and, smiling at the antiquated reprimands
cast at me by the past, genius, my every friend---
even my lamp---although it knows my agonies
to imitate the limpid-souled refined Chinese
who finds unalloyed rapture as he paints the end
of a flower on his cups made of moon-ravished snow
some unfamiliar flower whose scent he used to know
in childhood, and which still perfumes his crystalline
life, grafting itself on the soul's blue filigree.
And, because Death is such, with the sole reverie
of the sage, I shall choose serenely to design
a youthful landscape idly on the cups again.
A slender line of azure blue, pale and precise
would be a lake in skies of naked porcelain,
a lucid crescent lost behind white cloud proceeds
to steep its placid horn into the waters' ice
not far from three great emerald eyelashes, the reeds.
Translated by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore