Let break the charm that broke the hundredth time.
You are dismissed once more and for the very last
if you believed that I should always keep you
or that there was still need to be dismissed.
Stricken, a hundred times, I throw at you
the ample, lordly rope of my forgetting.
Now clad yourself against the greater cold,
now clad yourself because I pity us
for the great shame of the unequal strife,
for your humiliation and all else.
In a word, by now I pity only you.
How long and how in secret it has been like this.
To gild your fate how many times there sprang
from chating grace the lovely Leda psalms,
concocted and conveyed for sake of art for art.
I never did receive or take away.
I gently handed you the heresy
of kisses that in mind I kissed with others,
of love acts that in mind I loved with others;
and now I thank you for as many embraces,
I thank you for as many one-time Ledas
as any male may have the power to thank
when stepping over an old and worn-out kiss.
How long since I have tried to look for you
in sand dunes of the past and troubled present.'
On your future's slawish womanish path
how long ago I had dismissed you from my mind.
How long I searched for nothing
but to bequeath you something from myself
and my unique poetic, trumped-up charges
that in your orphaned love you might find solace
and claim you also were, not only he
who could not bear the weight alone
and hung some ornaments upon a woman.
From my proud breast which is insatiable and great
I wanted to behold a gentle fall
and not the small revenge of a forsaken female
who in her fury waits in ambush with some man,
and not the mocking ot your poor and little self,
for I had placed my Croesus mark on you
and gave you cause for faith that you belonged to me
and that your passing should take place unseen.
I presented you the largess of my embraces
that you would find a joy in them,
and you were nothing but a little question mark
until with my arrival you became fulfilled.
Will you flutter like a dessicated flower
from the leaves of a long tranquil prayer book
or will you flounce about and wear to rags
your purchased nimbus - this despotic, sombre yoke -
and my self-idolizing prayers
which stammer after all for some deserving woman?
I ask the destiny not to let you
presume to cross my starry fate.
Whatever swalloows you, a flood or dross,
you live through me because I saw you, but long ago
you ceased to be because I ceased to see you.