Die Rosenschale

Angry ones you saw flaring up, you saw two boys

clench themselves together into a Something,

that was hatred and rolled about on the ground

like an animal set upon by bees;

Actors, exaggerators piled high,

raging horses that collapsed,

flinging the gaze away, baring the teeth,

as if the skull were peeling itself out of the maw.

for before you stands the full bowl of roses,

which is unforgettable and brimmed full

with that utmost of being and inclining,

holding-out, never-being-able-to-give, standing-there,

that may be ours: an utmost for us too.

needing space, without taking space from that space

which the things all around diminish,

almost not being outlined, like something left blank

and nothing but inwardness, much strangely tender stuff

and self-illumining things, right up to the brim:

is anything at all known to us like this?

And then like this: that a feeling arises,

because petals are touching petals?

and beneath lie nothing but eyelids,

closed ones, as though, tenfold asleep, they

had to dampen an inner being's power of sight.

And this above all: that through these leaves

the light must pass. Out of the thousand skies

they slowly filter every drop of darkness,

in whose firelight the tangled cluster

of the stamens stirs and rears itself up.

gestures of so small a swing of arc,

that they would stay invisible, did their

rays not run apart into the universe.

and stands there in its great open petals

like a Venus upright in the shell;

and the blushing one, which as if confused

turns itself over toward a cool one,

and how the cool one, unfeeling, draws itself back,

and how the cold one stands, wrapped in itself,

among the open ones, which cast everything off.

And what they cast off — how that is light and heavy,

how it can be a coat, a burden, a wing

and a mask, depending,

and how they cast it off: as before the beloved.

which lies there hollow and open, not the rind

of a fruit, in which the same yellow,

gathered, more orange-red, was juice?

And was it already too much for this one, the opening,

because in the air its nameless pink

took on the bitter aftertaste of lilac?

And the cambric one, is it not a dress,

in which the shift still sticks, tender and warm with breath,

with which at once it was thrown off

in the morning shadow at the old forest pool?

And this one here, opaline porcelain,

fragile, a shallow china cup

and filled with little bright moths,–

and that one there, which holds nothing but itself?

if self-containing means: the world out there

and wind and rain and the patience of spring

and guilt and unrest and muffled fate

and the darkness of the evening earth

down to the clouds' shifting, flight and approach,

down to the vague influence of distant stars

into a handful of inwardness to transform?