Chapters (21)
Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difficult to understand?
We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close.
As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden.
And in the silence surrounding what happened to us
it is the bell to awaken God that we’ve heard ringing.
The Testimony of Light
Our life is a fire dampened, or a fire shut up in stone.
—JACOB BOEHME, De Incarnatione Verbi
Outside everything visible and invisible a blazing maple.
Daybreak: a seam at the curve of the world. The trousered legs of the women
shimmered.
They held their arms in front of them like ghosts.
The coal bones of the house clinked in a kimono of smoke.
An attention hovered over the dream where the world had been.
For if Hiroshima in the morning, after the bomb has fallen,
is like a dream, one must ask whose dream it is.
Must understand how not to speak would carry it with us.
With bones put into rice bowls.
While the baby crawled over its dead mother seeking milk.
Muga-muchu: without self, without center.
Thrown up in the sky by a wind.
The way back is lost, the one obsession.
The worst is over.
The worst is yet to come.
PART V
Book Codes: I
We must know whether
And if not: then what is the task
very much on the surface
by means of finite signs
when one is frightened of the truth
“Are there simple things?”
What depends on my life?
would be possible for me to write
like the film on deep water
over too wide chasms of thought
the world does not change
the visual field has not a form like this
so many graces of fate
the boundary (not a part) of the world
mirrored in its use
nothing except what can be said
Book Codes: II
a field tunneled by mice the same thought continually
like two hands indissolubly clasped to begin
as if in a coffin and can therefore think of nothing else
how incomplete a moment is human life
fragments together into a story before the shape of the whole
like a madman—time and again torn from my mouth
out of a nearby chimney each child’s hand was taken
though this is not a fairy tale explained in advance
the sign of the cross on an invisible face with the calm of a butcher
as if it bore witness to some truth
with whom every connection had been severed
as if in a coffin and can therefore think of nothing else
an afternoon swallowing down whole years its every hour
troops marching by in the snow until they are transparent
from the woods through tall firs a wood with no apparent end
cathedrals at the tip of our tongues with countries not yet seen
whoever can cry should come here