Everything already lost: this always
is the moment where we must begin.
Ecstasy: the self’s ghost
standing where you left it, paralyzed,
aghast, and joy, praise,
flooding your lips, your fingertips, the voice in you
huge and exquisite, its mouth
on the nape of your neck.

The west light, the north storm,
to have known, not to have known:
because that touch was silence
and the body is your home,

you will be named,
you will be seen,
the wing will open in you,
breaking. you,
caught in the slipstream of
your own bright anonymity,
you will be spoken to,
stunned, helpless, the wave rising through you
in the dark. Don’t
pull the curtain: let the black pane
see you: you,
in the mouth of the night.

Not knowing, knowing:
each worse, each holding
decades in its hand: kitchens,
dumb jokes, kindness and the shine
on the knob of the gear shift in the February sun.
If there were a sword, a block, you think
you’d lay your head along that coolness,
close your eyes. ut no,
the blood springs elsewhere, touch
flooding you with silence. You are born
and born again into your life.

If I were able, love,
to be with you eternally, if all things were
already lost. Take then
these songs I sang you,
north light, darkness, home, the ache
of the invisible and the pine trees
resinous with sunlight in the afternoon. O, the silence
in that naming, breaking
as you listened. And where the good stood inside you,
and empty shape, a wing.

I: The italicized lines in this poem are translations from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98, 
on which Schumann based melodic material in the Fantasie. The original German texts are by Alois Jeitelles.