Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

Poet at Seventy

Thus, brother theologian, here you are,
Connoisseur of heavens and abysses,
Year after year perfecting your art,
Choosing bookish wisdom for your mistress,
Only to discover you wander in the dark.

Ai, humiliated to the bone
By tricks that crafty reason plays,
You searched for peace in human homes
But they, like sailboats, glide away,
Their goal and port, alas, unknown.

You sit in taverns drinking wine,
Pleased by the hubbub and the din,
Voices grow loud and then decline
As if played out by a machine
And you accept your quarantine.

On this sad earth no time to grieve,
Love potions every spring are brewing,
Your heart, in magic, finds relief
Though Lenten dirges cut your cooing.
And thus you learn how to forgive.

Voracious, frivolous, and dazed
As if your time were without end
You run around and loudly praise
Theatrum where the flesh pretends
To win the game of nights and days.

In plumes and scales to fly and crawl,
Put on mascara, fluffy dresses,
Attempt to play like beast and fowl,
Forgetting interstellar spaces:
Try, my philosopher, this world.

And all your wisdom came to nothing
Though many years you worked and strived
With only one reward and trophy:
Your happiness to be alive
And sorrow that your life is closing.

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz

A Confession

MY LORD, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I know what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud.
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Berkeley, 1985

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

How It Should Be in Heaven

How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there.
By its river. Listening to its birds.
In its season: in summer, shortly after sunrise.
I would get up and run to my thousand works
And the garden was superterrestrial, owned by imagination.
I spent my life composing rhythmical spells
Not quite aware of what was happening to me.
But striving, chasing without cease
A name and a form. I think the movement of blood
Should continue there to be a triumphant one,
Of a higher, I would say, degree. That the smell of gillyflower,
That a nasturtium and a bee and a ladybug
Or their very essence, stronger than here,
Must summon us just the same to a core, to a center
Beyond the labyrinth of things. For how could the mind
Stop its hunt, if from the Infinite
It takes enchantment, avidity, promise?
But where is our, dear to us, mortality?
Where is time that both destroys and save us?
This is too difficult for me. Peace eternal
Could have no mornings and no evenings,
Such a deficiency speaks against it.
And that's too hard a nut for a theologian to crack.

Rome, 1986

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass