August
The sun, keeping its promise without deception,
Had penetrated early in the morning,
Tracing a saffron streak obliquely
From the window curtains to the divan.
The same sun splashed with sultry ocher
The woods near by, the hamlet's houses,
My bed, my dampened pillow
And the wall's angle near the bookshelf.
I have recalled the very reason
For the slight dampness of my pillow.
I had dreamt that all of you were trailing
Through the woods, coming to see me off.
There was a crowd of you, yet you were straggling. Suddenly
Someone recalled: according to the Old Style
It was the sixth of August--
The L-rd's Transfiguration.
On this day, usually, a light without a flame
Issues from Mount Tabor, and Autumn,
Refulgent as an oriflamme,
Draws all eyes by its many glories.
And you traversed the stunted, beggared,
Denuded, quaking scrubwood of the alders
And entered the cemetery coppice
Of flaring red and ornate as a ginger bunny.
The sky was pompously playing neighbor
To the unstirring treetops, while the distance
Was clamorous with the exchange
Of long-drawn clarion calls of roosters.
Death stood like a state surveyor
Within G-d's acre in this forest, scanning
My lifeless face, as if in thought
How best to dig my grave to proper measure.
All of you heard (not inwardly but with your sense of hearing)
The calm voice of someone close beside you.
That voice had been mine once, a fatidic voice.
It sounded now, untouched by death's corruption:
"Farewell to Transfiguration's azure
And to the Second Coming's gold!
Abate, with a last womanly caress,
The bitterness to me of this predestined hour.
Farewell to years of timelessness.
Let us part now, you who threw
Your woman's gauntlet to an abyss of degradations:
I am the arena of your ordeal.
Farewell, broad sweep of outspread wings,
Farewell to willfulness of soaring,
And to the image of the world through words made manifest,
And to creativity, and to working wonders."
No comments:
Post a Comment