after Paul Klee
spoked and spinning
cobra-quick I whistle
as in trains
—they fill with music
when you aren't looking
from the ashen balcony
quick talk along
the northern
Rhine
a dance of fish
in circles when the
waves
arrive
and menace of a flood
from high above
the oracle
in all its
quivering masks
how long from the
proscenium the sages
stood—now played
in foreign tones by
an orange — the universal egg
and a blossoming girl
dressed up in rubies
and a die thrown
by a god
rolls onstage shadowed by
the cosmic
arrow
preaching on the mountain
I'm all eyes—it's funny
—I the earless in
our maze—
when little hope comes
storming up to our old city
drunk on its
confusion
spelling the labyrinth hymn
in broken gestures
I'm the translator of
sorrow into song
I ascend every volcano
on earth to breathe its
purest smoke
and still my millionth leg
has not become a wing
and out of sunlit cries
and prayers to a timorous
moon
who has no time
I've kept no trace of love
and no great voice has
graced my
struck
millennia of suffering
and if I flew to
every lonesome planet
then O then
my mistress
worlds
would harmonize
in excentricity
—then we should win
the sovereign right to die
we the heavenless
would put out our last light
and end this princely dream
beneath a fallen dusk
we call the tunnel
of our time
revolting daily
everywhere
without
a
ground
only opacity survives
the clouds are
singing us
offstage