Homage to Georg Trakl

1.
When you walked under the stars,
happy as a drunk,
beneath the black boughs
of dead trees,
the wind blew colder
and the lake grew still.

2.
We search for ourselves
in deserted rooms
in a vial of ivory,
the mouth of a carp,
in the tulip and the eye of a wasp.
Let us become darkness.
Let us become death.

3.
You were a man without content
fighting on the German front lines,
an animal of absolute negation
absolutely defined.

4.
Under domed arbors and the morphine,
you lived in the blue month
and the black month,
and all time in between.

5.
Let the colors of day
melt from the landscape.
Let hope kill itself.
Let everything go back to the beginning.
Let's be done with these decaying rooms.

6.
You can reach right through yourself, dear Trakl.
You can pinch your eyes out
and hold them in hand.
You can walk on water and air.

7.
The mind is whitening,
ever deepening,
fumbling on every fattened word,
enveloped in false sound.

8.
Surely you are there under the absent sky,
in barren fields,
where red and blue deer
feed on nothing and live forever.

Copyright © 2005 Louis E. Bourgeois All rights reserved
from Olga
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Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission