King don Luis
by Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz (tr. John Peck)
King don Luis wanted to see again
The palace called Sweet Years.
Cloak of grief and a black horse.
Bell in the blank of evening:
Never so ominous as this--
Harsh as the wind's hurry
Through abandoned houses.
Indeed, it is a sound
Travelling farther than time.
Doors swinging into reveries
Over men dead, and women.
Treacherous advent, entering
From what dreams, what shores.
Over my mind it sleeps
In false glimmers of poison.
And the tall beggar, most certainly,
Is that sound's body.
On the road into exile.
Sinister, self-encountering!
I see two eyes nearly headless,
Two eyes on two legs of thread.
Farther than the forgotten,
Deeper than the drowned.
The black horse pricks its ears.
The king's blood would cry out
The smell of silence is so old.
by Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz (tr. John Peck)
King don Luis wanted to see again
The palace called Sweet Years.
Cloak of grief and a black horse.
Bell in the blank of evening:
Never so ominous as this--
Harsh as the wind's hurry
Through abandoned houses.
Indeed, it is a sound
Travelling farther than time.
Doors swinging into reveries
Over men dead, and women.
Treacherous advent, entering
From what dreams, what shores.
Over my mind it sleeps
In false glimmers of poison.
And the tall beggar, most certainly,
Is that sound's body.
On the road into exile.
Sinister, self-encountering!
I see two eyes nearly headless,
Two eyes on two legs of thread.
Farther than the forgotten,
Deeper than the drowned.
The black horse pricks its ears.
The king's blood would cry out
The smell of silence is so old.
