GEORG TRAKL
PSALM (FOR KARL KRAUS)
There is a light, that the wind has extinguished.
There is a pub on the heath, that a drunk departs in the afternoon.
There is a vineyard, charred and black with holes full of spiders.
There is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk.
The madman has perished. There is an island of the South Sea,
Receiving the Sun-God. The drums roar.
The men perform warlike dances.
The women hipsway in creeping vines and fire-flowers,
Whenever the ocean sings. O our lost Paradise.
The nymphs have departed the golden woods.
The stranger is buried. Then arises a flickering rain.
The son of Pan appears as an earthworker,
Who sleeps through noon at the edge of the glowing asphalt.
There are little girls in a courtyard, in little dresses full of heart-rending poverty!
There are rooms filled with Accords and Sonatas.
There are shadows which embrace each other before a blinded mirror.
At the windows of the hospital, convalescents warm themselves.
Up the canal a white steamer carries the bloody epidemic
The strange sister appears again in someone’s evil dreams.
Resting in the hazelbush, she plays with his stars.
The student, perhaps a doppelganger, stares long after her from the window.
Behind him stands his dead brother, or he comes down the old spiral stairs.
In darkness, brown chestnut trees fade the figure of the young novice.
The garden is in evening. Bats flutter about the cloister
The caretaker’s children cease their playing and seek the gold of heaven.
Final chord of a quartet. The little blind girl runs trembling down the avenue.
And later her shadow touches along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends.
There is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal at evening.
In the bleakness of the old asylum, human ruins decay.
The dead orphans lie at the garden wall.
From gray rooms tread angels with shit-spattered wings.
Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids.
The square before the church is dark and silent, as in the days of childhood.
On silver soles earlier lives glide by
And the shadows of the damned decline towards the sighing waters.
In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.
Silently above the place of skulls God’s golden eyes open.
//
Henri Michaux, Mescaline Drawing, 1960. MoMA.
Trakl is a main character in Adorno’s important concept of the enigmatical.
Source: Georg Trakl and Theodor Adorno — Caesura
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