Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen. Страница 192

At a window, will enwreathe

Such stillness on my brow: I breathe,

And walk on earth, and act my will,

And cry Peace! Peace! and all is still.

Though here, it seems, I must remain,

My thoughtless world, whereon men strain

Through lives of motion without sense,

Farewell! in this benevolence—

That all men may, as I, arrange

A love as simple, sweet, and strange

As few men know; nor can I tell,

But only imitate farewell.

1947

LOVE LETTER

Let not the sad perplexity

Of absent love unhumor thee:

Sighs, tears, and oaths, and laughter I have spent

To make my play with thee resolve in merriment;

For wisest critics past agree

The truest love is comedy.

Will thou not weary of the tragic argument?

Wouldst thou make love perverse, and then

Preposterous and crabbed, my pen?

Tempt Eros not (he is more wise than I)

To suck the apple of thy sad absurdity.

Love, who is a friend to men,

You’ld make a Devil of again:

Then should I be once more exiled, alas, in thee.

Make peace with me, and in my mind,

With Eros, angel of the mind,

Who loves me, loving thee, and in our bliss

Is loved by all of us and finds his happiness.

Such simple pleasures are designed

To entertain our days, I find,

And so shalt thee, when next we make a night of this.

This spring we’ll be not merely mad,

But absent lovers, therefore sad,

So we’ll be no more happy than we ought—

That simple love of Eros may be strangely taught.

And wit will seldom make me glad

That spring hath not what winter had,

Therefore these nights are darkened shadows of my thought.

Grieve in a garden, then, and in a summer’s twilight,

Think of thy love, for spring is lost to me.

Or as you will, and if the moon be white,

Let all thy soul to music married be,

To magic, nightingales, and immortality;

And, if it pleases thee, why, think on Death;

For Death is strange upon a summer night,

The thought of it may make thee catch thy breath,

And meditation hath itself a great beauty;

Wherefore if thou must weep, now I must mourn with thee.

Easter Sunday, 1947

DAKAR DOLDRUMS

Most dear, and dearest at this moment most,

Since this my love for thee is thus more free

Than that I cherished more dear and lost;

Most near, now nearest where I fly from thee:

Thy love most consummated is in absence,

Half for the trust I have for thee in mind,

Half for the pleasures of thee in remembrance—

Thou art most full and fair of all thy kind.

Not half so fair as thee is fate I fear,

Wherefore my sad departure from this season

Wherein for some love of me thou held’st me dear,

While I betray thee for a better reason.

I am a brutish agonist, I know

Lust or its consummation cannot ease

These miseries of mind, this mask like sorrow:

It is myself, not thee, shall make my peace.

Yet, O sweet soul, to have possessed thy love,

The meditations of thy mind for me,

Hath half deceived a thought that ill shall prove.

It was a grace of fate, this scene of comedy

Foretold more tragic acts in my short age.

Yet ’tis no masque of mine, no mere sad play

Spectacular upon an empty stage—

My life is more unreal, another way.

To lie with thee, to touch thee with desire,

Enrage the summer nights with thy mere presence—

Flesh hath such joy, such sweetness, and such fire!

The white ghost fell on me, departing thence.

Henceforth I must perform a winter mood;

Beloved gestures freeze in bitter ice,

Eyes glare through a pale jail of solitude,

Fear chills my mind: Here endeth all my bliss!

Cursed may be this month of Fall! I fail

My full and fair and near and dear and kind.

I but endure my role, my own seas sail,

Far from the sunny shores within thy mind.

So this departure shadoweth mine end:

Ah! what poor human cometh unto me,

Since now the snowy spectre doth descend,

Henceforth I shall in fear and anger flee.

Lord, forgive my passions, they are old,

And restive as the years that I have known.

To what abandonments have I foretold

My bondage? And have mine own love undone!