Equinox
Elegy
To look...

I change... Who flees from me?... Her foliage immobile

Overwhelms the tree I look on...

Her thick arms are tired of cradling my sibyls:

My silence their voices has forgone.

My soul, if that her hymn were indeed a fountain

Which sang her waters one and all,

Is no more than deep water where the stone that’s distant

Marks the tomb of birds that fall.

In the simple bed of sand as fine as cinders

Sleep the footsteps I have lost,

And I feel me living under shades descend

By their vestiges all tossed.

I lose and that distinctly Psyche the sleepwalker

In the water’s too pure veils

The calm of which and weather a mere bubble alters

Which this tomb to burst avails.

Unto herself, maybe, She speaks and grants a pardon,

But ceding to her eyes close-shut,

From me she flees faithful, and, tender, me abandons

To my fate inanimate.

Unto my heart she leaves her loss without a reason,

And this hopeless beating heart

Argues with Persephone Eurydice once bitten

In her pure breast by the dart...

Somber and dying witness of our tender annals,

O sun, like unto our love,

The invincible sweetnesses of sea-beaches infernal

Call you to shores you can’t rise above.

Autumn, transparency! o solitude amassed

Of sadness and of liberty!

All is clear to me as soon as it is passed;

What is no more becomes clarity.

Whileas I stick fast with my stony gaze

Within the hard and settled “Why?”,

A darksome tremble only, a mere eyelid’s shade

Shakes between myself and I...

O what eternity of spontaneous absence

Comes all at once to abridge itself?...

A single leaf that falls has divvied up the months

With its inconsequential event.

Toward me, stay you ardent, foliage feeble and dry,

Roll you out your rumor soft,

And you, pallid Sun, with your arrows final,

Pierce me these times dying off...

Yes, I awake at last, seized with a wind autumnal

That raises up a flight red and triste;

So much purple panic in golden trumps astounds me

That irritated I exist!

Paul Valéry