Now girding eager
come fire upon
us become day!
For when the proof
guts the groin
one may sense a clamour in the woods.
But we sing of those who
have come from afar, the Indus
and of Alpheus, having
long sought what is destined,
not without wings may one
reach the next,
straightaway,
and come out the other side.
Here we want but to live
for streams make arable
the soil, and when the leaves turn
in the summer converging paths
with the beasts humans too
go to the source.
They call it the Ister.
It stays pure. It burns defoliate at the seams
and regathers force, bewildered set
apart and together they stand; above
a second one, Meuse, springs ahead
on the scaley coverings. Now no
wonder is to me that it
summons Heracles as guest.
Sheen of a distant Olympus under
where he came to finding the shades,
themselves keening I S T H M O S,
for full of courage there
they were! but wanting, too, that he
move the shadows. Around it each would
be pulled curling the well and watering the coast
yellow to burn upwards in
the black of the spruce forest, in the depths
a hunter meanders pleased
at midday, and oaks echo
hearable the currents grow, is
the seeming counter-
flow a backwards fo(rward) mo(tion)?
“Ichthys,” which would have brought him
from Eastern shores.
Much could
be said thereof. But how does it
bend straight to the mountainous side
of the Rhein, to dry where
girthing gratuitous rhymes, it
cunctates stammering, how? “Sie sollen nemlich
Zur Sprache seyn” (Heidegger, Andenken)
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