So as not to have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because I’m a little afraid of
her as she really is.
I don’t really know what I want, and I don’t even want to
know what I want.
All I want is to think her.
I don’t ask anything of anyone, not even of her, except to let
me think.
10 JULY 1930
from UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Beyond the bend in the road
There may be a well, and there may be a castle,
And there may be just more road.
I don’t know and don’t ask.
As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bend
I look only at the road before the bend,
Because the road before the bend is all I can see.
It would do me no good to look anywhere else
Or at what I can’t see.
Let’s pay attention only to where we are.
There’s enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.
If there are people beyond the bend in the road,
Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.
That, for them, is the road.
If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.
For now we know only that we’re not there.
Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bend
There’s the road without any bend.
[1914]
To clean and tidy up Matter . . .
To put back all the things people cluttered up
Because they didn’t understand what they were for . . .
To straighten, like a diligent housekeeper of Reality,
The curtains on the windows of Feeling
And the mats before the doors of Perception . . .
To sweep the rooms of observation
And to dust off simple ideas . . .
That’s my life, verse by verse.
17 SEPTEMBER 1914
What’s my life worth? In the end (I don’t know what end)
One man says: “I earned three hundred thousand dollars.”
Another man says: “I enjoyed three thousand days of glory.”
Yet another says: “I had a clear conscience and that’s enough.”
And I, should somebody ask what I did,
Will say: “Nothing except look at things,
Which is why I have the whole Universe in my pocket.”
And if God should ask: “And what did you see in things?”
I’ll answer: “Just the things themselves. That’s all you put
there.”
And God, who after all is savvy, will make me into a new kind
of saint.
17 SEPTEMBER 1914
The astonishing reality of things
Is my discovery every day.
Each thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this
makes me,
And how much this suffices me.
All it takes to be complete is to exist.
I’ve written quite a few poems,
I’ll no doubt write many more,
And this is what every poem of mine says,
And all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is a different way of saying this.
Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking about whether it exists.
I don’t get sidetracked, calling it my sister.
I like it for being a stone,
I like it because it feels nothing,
I like it because it’s not related to me in any way.
At other times I hear the wind blow,
And I feel that it was worth being born just to hear the wind
blow.
I don’t know what people will think when they read this,
But I feel it must be right since I think it without any effort
Or any idea of what people who hear me will think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it the way my words say it.
I was once called a materialist poet,
And it surprised me, for I didn’t think
I could be called anything.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, the value isn’t mine,
It belongs to my poems.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.
7 NOVEMBER 1915
When spring arrives,
If I’m already dead,
The flowers will flower in the same way
And the trees will not be less green than last spring.
Reality doesn’t need me.
It makes me enormously happy
To think that my death is of no importance whatsoever.
If I knew that I would die tomorrow
And that spring was the day after tomorrow,
I would die happy, because spring was the day after
tomorrow.
If that is its time, why should it come at some other time?
I like everything to be real and to be right,
And I like it that way because that’s how it would be even if
I didn’t like it.
And so, if I die now, I’ll die happy,
Because everything is real and everything is right.
You can pray in Latin over my coffin, if you like.
If you like, you can sing and dance in a circle around it.
I have no preferences for when I can no longer have
preferences.
What will be, when it is, is what it will be when it is.
7 NOVEMBER 1915
If, after I die, someone wants to write my biography,
There’s nothing simpler.
It has just two dates—the day I was born and the day I died.
Between the two, all the days are mine.
I’m easy to define.
I saw as if damned to see.
I loved things without any sentimentality.
I never had a desire I couldn’t satisfy, because I was never
blind.
Even hearing was never more for me than an accompaniment
to seeing.
I understood that things are real and all of them different
from each other.
I understood this with my eyes, never with my mind.
To understand this with my mind would be to find them all
alike.
One day, like a child, I suddenly got tired.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
Besides all that, I was the only poet of Nature.
8 NOVEMBER 1915
I don’t know how anyone can think a sunset is sad,
Unless it’s because a sunset isn’t a sunrise.
But if it’s a sunset, how could it ever be a sunrise?
8 NOVEMBER 1915
You speak of civilization and how it shouldn’t exist,
At least not as it is.
You say that everyone, or almost everyone, suffers
From human life being organized in this way.
You say that if things were different, people would suffer less.
You say things would be better if they were how you want
them.
I hear you and don’t listen.
Why would I want to listen to you?
I’d learn nothing by listening to you.
If things were different, they’d be different: that’s all.
If things were how you want them, they’d be how you want
them, fine.
Too bad for you and for all who spend life
Trying to invent the machine for producing happiness!
Today someone read me St. Francis of Assisi.
I listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
How could a man who was so fond
of things
Never have looked at them or understood what they were?
Why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
To feel it better?
I feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something—
Sister, or mother, or daughter.
Water is beautiful because it’s water.
If I call it my sister,
I can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
And that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
Or, better yet, not to call it anything
But to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
Without any names.
21 MAY 1917
I see in the distance a ship on the Tagus . . .
It’s sailing downriver indifferently.
Not indifferently because it ignores me
And I don’t care, but indifferently
Because it has no meaning
Outside the exclusively shippish fact
Of sailing downriver without permission from metaphysics . . .
Downriver toward the reality of sea.
1 OCTOBER 1917
When it’s cold in the season for cold, to me it feels pleasant,
Since, suited as I am to how things exist,
What’s natural is what’s pleasant just because it’s natural.
I accept life’s hardships because they’re destiny,
As I accept the harsh cold in the dead of winter—
Calmly and without complaint, as one who simply accepts,
And finds joy in the fact of accepting,
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the
inevitably natural.
Aren’t the illnesses I have and the adversity I experience
Just the winter of my life and person?
An erratic winter, whose laws of appearing are unknown to me
But that exists for me by the same sublime fatality,
The same inevitable fact of being outside me,
As the earth’s heat in high summer
And the earth’s cold in the depths of winter.
I accept because it’s my nature to accept.
Like everyone, I was born subject to errors and defects,
But not to the error of wanting to understand too much,
Not to the error of wanting to understand only with the
intelligence,
Not to the defect of requiring the world
To be something other than the world.
24 OCTOBER 1917
Whoever or whatever is at the center of the world
Gave me the outer world as an example of Reality,
And when I say “this is real,” even of a feeling,
I can’t help but see it in some kind of external space,
In a visual kind of way, outside and apart from me.
Being real means not being inside myself.
My inner self doesn’t have any reality I can conceive of.
I know the world exists, but I don’t know if I do.
I’m more certain of the existence of my white house
Than of the inner existence of the white house’s owner.
I believe in my body more than in my soul,
Since my body’s right here in the midst of reality,
It can be seen by others,
It can touch others,
It can sit down and stand up,
Whereas my soul can’t be defined except by outer terms.
It exists for me—in the moments when I think it exists—
By borrowing from the World’s outer reality.
If the soul is more real
Than the outer world, as you, philosopher, say it is,
Then why was the outer world given to me as reality’s
prototype?
If my feeling is more certain
Than the existence of the thing I feel,
Then why do I feel that thing and why does it appear
Independently of me,
Without needing me to exist—
Me, who am forever bound to myself, forever personal and
nontransferable?
Why do I move with other people
In a world where we understand each other and coincide,
If the world is what’s mistaken and I’m the one who’s right?
If the world is a mistake, it’s a mistake for everybody,
Whereas each of us is just his own mistake.
Between the two, the world is more in the right.
But why all these questions, unless it’s because I’m sick?
On the outer and therefore right days of my life,
On the days when I’m perfectly, naturally lucid,
I feel without feeling that I feel,
I see without knowing that I see,
And the Universe is never so real as then,
The Universe is never (it’s not near or far from me
But) so sublimely not-mine.
When in life I say “it’s obvious,” do I mean “only I can see it”?
When in life I say “it’s true,” do I mean “it’s my opinion”?
When in life I say “it’s there,” do I mean “it’s not there”?
And why should it be any different in philosophy?
We live before we philosophize, we exist before we know
we do,
And the earlier fact merits at least homage and precedence.
Yes, we are outer before we are inner.
Therefore we are essentially outer.
You say, sick philosopher, every philosopher, that this is
materialism.
But how can this be materialism, if materialism is a
philosophy,
If a philosophy, to belong to me, would have to be a
philosophy of mine,
And none of this is mine, nor am I even I?
24 OCTOBER 1917
War, which inflicts suffering on the world with its
squadrons,
Is the perfect demonstration of philosophy’s error.
War, like everything human, wants to change things.
But nothing wants to change things more than war, and to
change them so much
And to change them so quickly.
But war causes death.
And to cause death is to disdain the universe.
Since it results in death, war proves itself wrong.
Since it’s proven wrong, all wanting-to-change-things is
proven wrong.
Let’s leave the outer universe and other people where Nature
put them.
So much pride and lack of awareness!
So much bustling, having to do things, wanting to leave a
mark!
When his heart stops beating, the commander of the
squadrons
Slowly returns to the outer universe.
In Nature’s direct chemistry
There’s no room for thought.
Humanity is an uprising of slaves.
Humanity is a government usurped by the people,
Existing because usurped, but erring, since to usurp is to
have no right.
Let the outer world and natural humanity be!
Peace to all prehuman things, including those in man!
Peace to the wholly outer essence of the Universe!
24 OCTOBER 1917
All the opinions ever formed about Nature
Never made a flower bloom or a blade of grass grow.
All the knowledge there is of things
Was never something I could seize, like a thing.
If science aspires to be true,
What truer science than that of things without science?
I close my eyes, and the reality of the hard earth I’m lying on
Is so real that even the bones in my back feel it.
Where I have shoulder blade
s I don’t need reason.
29 MAY 1918
O ship setting out on a distant voyage,
Why don’t I miss you the way other people do
After you’ve vanished from sight?
Because, when I don’t see you, you cease to exist.
And if I feel nostalgia for what doesn’t exist,
The feeling is in relationship to nothing.
It’s not the ship but our own selves that we miss.
29 MAY 1918
Truth, falsehood, certainty, uncertainty . . .
The blind man there on the road also knows these words.
I’m sitting near the top of the steps with my hands folded
On the higher of my crossed knees.
So what are truth, falsehood, certainty and uncertainty?
The blind man stops on the road;
I’ve taken my hands off my knee.
Do truth, falsehood, certainty and uncertainty remain the
same?
Something changed in a part of reality—my knees and my
hands.
What science can explain this?
The blind man continues on his way and my hands keep still.
It’s no longer the same time, or the same people, or the same
anything . . .
To be real is this.
12 APRIL 1919
Hillside shepherd, so far away from me with your sheep,
Is the happiness you seem to have your happiness or mine?
Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me?
No, shepherd, neither to you nor to me.
It belongs only to peace and happiness.
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 7
