translated by Karen Elizabeth Gordon
A great gnashing
of teeth and pop-
ping of knuckles
followed and many
bard feelings got
thwacked about, and
many wings were
bruised
Now don't you worry - things
are skittering along toward the
brink of the abyss, and noth-
thing you or I might do will alter
their awful course.
We stretched our imaginations
across the chasm of our doubts and
proceeded with quaking belief
there was once a man
who lived in a castle sur-
rounded by a moan
I'm waiting for him to start dazzling these cadavers
"A long time is little to me," he answered
sadly, "but forever is nothing."
And so, from these ghastly ruminations
we turned to more cheerful topics
She swung shut the door of her smile of greeting,
slaying the dark with her piercing shrieks.
Oh, I don't know about that mouth of
hers. Sometimes it seems like a gimmick.
Spring was trilling outside the window. gos-
samer raised her nose from the grindstone
of her needlework and sniffed the air.
something was twittering inside her, too,
heaving her bosom and lifting her spirits,
which had been so low of late
I want you to drag me home with you
by the roots of my own meanings
She broke the silence engulfing them
with an audible hush and tingle
Pleased to make your deep acquaintance
Your bedroom eyes are twinkling
There's no lust lost between us
And he kept on besmirching me
although I beseeched him to stop.
Is this going to put a wonderful
smudge forever upon my name?
She snagged the tip of her glove's
index finger on a spoke of her umbrella.
A patch of her wing began to itch
A big sprawling feet and snarled hair wallflowered me.
She gathered herself into an anxious horde and
went flitting along the road of her misfortune
.
Gordon notes in the introduction,
“This was a time when people were still known by their footsteps and beggars were rewarded for their trouble. A time when manners mattered twice as much as madness and half as much as magic…”
