…

I’ve got a ticket to the moon
I’ll be leaving here any day soon
Yeah, I’ve got a ticket to the moon
But I’d rather see the sunrise in your eyes.

Got a ticket to the moon
I’ll be rising high above the earth so soon
And the tears I cry might turn into the rain
That gently falls upon your window
You’ll never know.

…

Ich glaube es fiele mir nicht schwer, unter Tieren zu leben.
Sie sind so still und genügsam.
Lange kann ich dabei verweilen, ihnen zuzusehen

Sie rackern sich nicht ab, sie jammern nicht,
wie schlecht sie dran sind.
Sie wälzen sich nachts nicht im Bett, um ihre
Sünden zu beklagen.
Sie öden mich nicht an, indem sie mir ihre Pflichten
gegenüber Gott darlegen.
Keines von ihnen ist unzufrieden, keines infiziert vom Wahn, etwas besitzen zu müssen,
keines beugt vor seinen Artgenossen das Knie, auch nicht vor irgendeinem der
seit Jahrtausenden tot ist.
Keines hat einen Ruf zu verlieren, keines von ihnen ist unglücklich über diese Welt.

– Walt Whitman

„Eines Abends erwachte in seiner Seele der Wunsch, ein Bild zu formen, das die Wonne des Augenblicks darstellen sollte. Und er ging hinaus in die Welt, um Bronze zu suchen, denn nur in Bronze konnte er denken. Aber verschwunden war alle Bronze der ganzen Welt. In der ganzen Welt war nirgends Bronze zu finden, mit Ausnahme der bronzenen Figur des Ewigen Leides.
Und diese Figur hatte er selbst geformt, mit seinen eigenen Händen gebildet, und er hatte sie gesetzt auf ein Grab, und unter diesem Grabe lag alles, was er geliebt hatte im Leben. Auf das Grab dessen, was er am meisten geliebt hatte im Leben, hatte er gesetzt dies Werk seiner Kunst, damit es zeuge für die Liebe des Mannes, die nie stirbt und ein Symbol sei des Leides, das ewiglich dauert. Und keine andere Bronze gab es in der ganzen Welt als die Bronze dieser Figur.
Und er nahm die Figur, die er geschaffen hatte, und tat sie in den Schmelzofen und übergab sie dem Feuer. Und aus dem bronzenen Bild des Leides, das ewig währt, formte er das Bild der Wonne, die im Augenblick vergeht.” (Oscar Wilde)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

In the light tent in the swinging field in the great spring evening, near the sea and the shingled boat with a mast of cedar-wood, the hinderwood decked with beaks and shells, a folded, salmon sail, and two finned oars; with gulls in one flight high over, stork, pelican, and sparrow, flying to the ocean’s end and the first grain of a timeless land that spins on the head of a sand glass, a hoop of feathers down the dark of the spring in a topsyturvy year; as the rocks in history, by every feature and scrawled limb, eye of a needle, shadow of a nerve, cut in the heart, by rifted fibre and clay thread, recorded for the rant of odyssey the dropping of the bay-leaf toppling of the oak-tree splintering of the moonstone against assassin avatar undead and numbered waves, a man was born in the direction of the beginning. And out of sleep, where the moon had raised him through the mountains in her eyes and by the strong, eyed arms that fall behind her, full of tides and fingers, to the blown sea, he wrestled over the edge of the evening, took to the beginning as a goose to the sky, and called his furies by their names from the wind-drawn index of the grave and waters. Who was this stranger who came like a hailstone, cut in ice, a snow leafed seabush for her hair, and taller than a cedarmast, the north white rain descending and the whale-driven sea cast up to the caves of the eye, from a fishermen’s city on the floating island? She was salt and white and travelling as the field, on one blade, swung with its birds around her, evening centred in the neverstill heart, he heard her hands among the treetops –a feather dived, her fingers flowed over the voices- and the world went drowning down through a siren stranger’s vision of grass and waterbeasts and snow. The world was sucked to the last lake’s drop; the cataract of the last particle worried in a lather to the ground, as if the rain had led its clouds fall turtle-turning like a manna made of the soft-bellied seasons, and the hard hail, falling, spread and flustered in a cloud half flower half ash or the comb-footed scavenger’s wind through a pyramid raised high with mud or the soft slow drift of mingling steam and leaves. In the exact centre of enchantment he was a shoreman in deep sea, lashed by his hair to the eye in the cyclop breast, with his swept thighs strung among her voice; white bears swam and sailor drowned to the music she scaled and drew with hands and fables from his upright hair; she plucked his terror by the ears, and bore him singing into light through the forest of the serpent-haired and the stone-turning voice. Revelation stared back over its transfixed shoulder. Which was her genesis, the last spark of judgement or the first whale’s spout from the waterland? The conflagration at the end, a burial fire jumping, a spent rocket hot on its nail, or, where the first spring and its folly climbed the sea barriers and the garden locks were bruised, capped and douting water over the mountain candlehead? Whose was the image in the wind, the print on the cliff, the echo knocking to be answered? She was orioled and serpent-haired. She moved into the swallowing, salty field, the chronicle and the rocks, the dark anatomies, the anchored sea itself. She raged in the mule’s womb. She faltered in the galloping dynasty. She was loud in the old grave, kept a still, quick tongue in the sun. He marked her outcast image, mapped with a nightmare’s foot in poison and framed against the wind, print of her thumb that buckled on its hand with a webbed shadow, interrogation of the familiar echo: which is my genesis, the granite fountain extinguishing where the first flame is cast in the sculptured world, or the bonfire maned like a lion in the threshold of the last vault? One voice then in that evening travelled the light and water waves, one lineament took on the sliding moods, from where the gold green sea cantharis dyes the trail of the octopus one venom crawled through foam, and from the four map corners one cherub in a island shaped puffed the clouds to sea.