Instead of Thinking about a Career

Fie on’t! ah fie!
(Hamlet)

Dear son,
               Now listen to what I say:
“Man is a tool-making animal.”
“Time is money.” “I don’t like Rome,
it smells like death.” You weren’t put on this earth, young man,
to wander around daydreaming, to sit on the balcony
spitting at pavers, or to chase wisps of passing cloud
and leave your fate to the vagaries of chance.
“A father is a friend given by nature,”
and you’re at the age now son where you really ought to
start thinking about a career,
                                           Your father.
                                                      — Oh! to ride
the wind over the endless steppe, where,
submerged in melodious fluid, planets,
suns and momentary atoms solemnly drift
and are crushed by thought; they barely linger
to mark a single second on the eternal clock
that looks down in pity at the dizzying waltz of the universe!
To ride! to ride! with such a thunderous flight
that my turbulent wake would blow out
from afar the fiery dust of the stars!
that I could hear the whistling of my marrowless bones!
and, rushing headlong over these fields of death
past extinguished but still-smouldering suns,
that I could crack open the hardened shell of my brain
and bare my giddy, drunken soul!
in the mystical guise of a flaming tongue,
like the mischievous blue will-o’-the-wisp
that comes at night to dance over the ivory tomb
where for the last two weeks — if I remember rightly —
my golden-haired beloved has been rotting.
— Poor Lotte! O woe! — or like the
jolly ruby grenade insignia on
the collars of fair France’s artillerymen,
Wings!
            Vain hopes! We’re fated to crawl over
an alien land, like slugs leaving silver trails!
Crawling, ever crawling! Look at the solicitors
and linguists, look at Coppée and the budding virgins!
— Ah! console me, Sarah, you who have
never spoken nor smiled, whose jet-black eyes
seem ever to be striving beyond space itself,
bring me, I pray you, bring me a goatskin
and fill it up with that heady, rosy wine
that spurts from your breast at sundown;
for I feel my heart shiver in my ribs;
I’m overcome with spleen and cold, despondent guests!