The Lives of Others

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When will we see Him face to face?


Each day, He shines through darker glass.


In this small town where everything


is known, I see His vanishing


emblems, His white spire and flag -


pole sticking out above the fog,


like old white china doorknobs, sad,


slight, useless things to calm the mad


- -from Waking Early Sunday Morning



We gaze and gaze, sometimes dreamily, sometimes with an intense longing. We fear the closing of doors, the flame cooling, our bodies taking form. Behind the right door is the star prize, if only we would know it. As if the truth was just around the corner. But so many go unopened...the lives we did not live, that were cancelled out. Had we but taken a step to the left instead of the right the universe would have been like this, not like that.

Sometimes we come across an old building, or a particular face and think to ourselves: my life must have once been part of her story, I must have lived in this place once before. As if we could hum a tune without knowing the words. The memory of you real but fading, disappearing, like a photograph kept in a chest in the attic for assurance, a room within the room of the heart...

Every word is a doorway to a meeting.

But only one word takes us there, only one unlocks the door. Then, and only then, do we unfasten our hair, loosen up our being, unfold our hands. And then there is no door, no inner or outer. Then, when everything silently falls away, how shall we speak face to face?

1

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2

Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what's happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can't remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can't recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3

And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927) (S.H. transl.)(Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232)