SEASONABLE NIGHT

Now Time blooms more and more ice-flowers, thorns of frozen silence, wire-barriers: silent assassins - the air sifts mists of itself, and sifts mists of itself: sorrows, bitternesses, self-pity float like boats from the lake of broken looks. Now Winter starts a heart-war, the frozen ice-rocks are rattled by the empty frost - she will not come, because they will not let the deer-eyed girl come for me, for whom I once fought and struggled with my pessimism! 

And still the wounded dirt of the alley-smelling city barely clears. Rather like a choking, thick tar, It grows as the darkness must descend. Thirty years beyond the mirror, yawning, you find an old man: The contented existence has fallen by his side, - For he knew it, and proclaimed it, and because he alone willed it so! Our dreams shall return no more - the rainbow-possibility of our imagination May be for prodigal posterity! 

Beside me the lonely prophet: the three-hent cone of the mountain-ridge yawns its sorrows, its petty griefs, to a beat: I watch the time-worn basalt, the andesite relations of the mute stone: the wonder of matter, which is changing in its course, still lingers, rubbing on the fabric of recognition! 

The thunder of lightning rushes on, its knife-warring death-dance is received with growing dumbness and doubt by the taming sheep of the cloud! - And in the galactic dwellings of the spangling stars, spaciously lonely cosmos, with murderous patience, like diligent report-wishers, they explode, wounding even the vulnerable Night!