Can Be No Sorrow

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died

(it’s there in her museum in Meersburg),

on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s,

Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland,

in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes

rested on white pillows

till they looked their last—

all of it junk now, or no longer extant,

unattributable, anonymous

in its insentient and continual disintegration.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,

the gene of death and the gene of love—

who separated them, the words and things,

who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end,

the few boards and the floods of tears,

home for a few wretched hours.

Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote,

bed and tears too impalpable,

no No, no Yes,

birth and bodily pain and faith

an undefinable surge, a lurch,

a power stirring in its sleep

moved bed and tears—

sleep well!