HAUNTING

Now the sky opens its great blue trellises, And the parting cold tears, like stifling little glass marbles, With pain in themselves, while down below in the ant's nest of the cold landscape The scaly trees rustle their rusted leaves for the last time. At the end of autumn's golden streams, buried in soft and caressing cushion-buttons, angel's eyes rest, - enjoying the immortal harmony: Up on the great Bald Mountain the carpeted grass has long since faded, ruined and yellowed to a golden mound!

The young lovers linger a while longer, entwined in each other's arms, and breathlessly awaiting the immortal fulfilment of dawn. Drunk with love, their ears quivering, Poppy-red, and their hearts for each other breathing, A purple glowing furnace, thus they wait, bewitched, enchanted, and none of them moves, While they long wrapped in blankets, their Edenic

And would so well, now pausing moments, To steal arbitrarily and greedily the blessed fragments of divine eternity, - But cannot: For the self-sacrificing angel is long since a mother, While her unhappy knight is broken and bitter!

They are haunted now, like cursed ghosts, by eternal years, and neither dared to cry out, and as long as they were together, to say with a reserved head, "Would that we had known sooner that the wounded Heart of us two was the more tender and vulnerable!" - The buffoon, who now casts his eyes on the mountain-agagasties, ponders, sighs alone, How is it that he still loves the naughty angel? - Even now he is only delaying to find the answer...