The Vintagers
For Nani and Klaus Demus
They autumn the wine of their eyes,
they press all the wept, this too:
so night will have it,
that night they lean against, wall,
so the stone demands,
that stone over which their crutch talks away
into the answer’s silence –
their crutch that once,
once only in autumn,
when the year swells to death, as a bunch of grapes,
that once only speaks through the dumbness, down
into the shaft of the merely thought.
They autumn, they press the wine,
they press time as they press their eyes,
they press the trickles in, the wept,
in the sun’s grave they prepare
with hands made strong by night:
so that a mouth will thirst for it, later –
a late mouth, resembling theirs:
skewed towards blind things and maimed –
a mouth to which drink foams up from the depth while
the sky descends to the waxen sea,
to gleam from afar as a candle stump
when at last the lip moistens.
Translated by Michael Hamburger
Page(s) 31-32
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