James Merrill - The Book of Ephraim (I) [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

I’d rather skip this part, but courage––
What we dream up must be lived down, I think.
I went to my ex-shrink
With the whole story, right through the miscarriage

Of plans for Joselito. He
Got born to a WEST VIRGINIA IN STATE
ASYLUM ––D too late
Recalls “Gin’s” real name: Jennifer Marie.

(The following week, I’ll scarcely dare
Ask after Betsy. But her child, it seems,
OUTDOES THE WILDEST DREAMS
OF PATRONS Whew. And later, when through fair

Silk bangs, at six months, Wendell peers
Up at me, what are such serene blue eyes
For, but to recognize––?
However.) We have MEDDLED And the POWERS

ARE FURIOUS Hans, in Dutch and grim,
May send no further word. Ephraim they’ve brought
Before a kind of court
And thrown the book (the Good Book? YES) at him.

We now scare him with flippancies.
DO U WANT TO LOSE ME WELL U COULD
AGENTS CAN BREAK OUR CODE
TO SMITHEREENS How Kafka! PLEASE O PLEASE

Whereupon the cup went dead,
And since then––no response, hard as we’ve tried,
“And so I just thought I’d . . .”
Winding up lamely. “Quite,” the doctor said,

Exuding insight. “There’s a phrase
You may have heard––what you and David do
We call folie à deux.
Harmless; but can you find no simpler ways

To sound each other’s depths of spirit
Than taking literally that epigram
Of Wilde’s I’m getting damn
Tired of hearing my best patients parrot?”

“Given a mask, you mean, we’ll tell––?”
Tom nodded. “So the truth was what we heard?”
“A truth,” he shrugged. “It’s hard
To speak of the truth. Now suppose you spell

It out. What underlies these odd
Inseminations by psycho-roulette?”
I stared, then saw the light:
“Somewhere a Father Figure shakes his rod

At sons who have not sired a child?
Through our own spirit we can both proclaim
And shuffle off the blame
For how we live––that good enough?” Tom smiled

And rose. “I’ve heard worse. Those thyroid
Pills––you still use them? Don’t. And keep in touch.”
I walked out into much
Guilt-obliterating sunlight. FREUD

We learned that evening DESPAIRS
OF HIS DISCIPLES & SAYS BITTE NIE
ZU AUFGEBEN THE KEY
TO YR OWN NATURES We felt clouds disperse

On all sides. Our beloved friend
Was back with us! We’d think some other time
About the hour with Tom
––Nonchalance that would gradually extend

Over a widening area. The question
Of who or what we took Ephraim to be,
And of what truths (if any) we considered
Him spokesman, had arisen from the start.
If he blacked out reason (or vice versa)
On first sight, we instinctively avoided
Facing the eclipse with naked eye.
Early attempts to check what he let fall
Failed, E's grasp of dates and places being
Feeble as ours, his Latin like my own
Vestigial; even D knew better German.
As through smoked glass, we charily observed
Either that his memory was spotty
(Whose wouldn’t be, after two thousand years?)
Or that his lights and darks were a projection
Of what already burned, at some obscure
Level or another, in our skulls.
We, all we knew, dreamed, felt and had forgotten
Flesh made word, became through him a set of
Quasi-grammatical constructions which
Could utter some things clearly, forcibly,
Others not. Like Tosca hadn’t we
Lived for art and love? We were not tough-
Or literal-minded, or unduly patient
With those who were. Hadn’t––from books, from living––
The profusion dawned on us, of “languages”
Any one of which, to who could read it,
Lit up the system it conceived?––bird-flight,
Hallucinogen, chorale and horoscope:
Each its own world, hypnotic, many-sided
Facet of the universal gem
Ephraim’s revelations––we had them
For comfort, thrills and chills, “material.”
He didn’t cavil. He was the revelation
(Or if we had created him, then we were).
The point––one twinkling point by now of thousands––
Was never to forego, in favor of
Plain dull proof, the marvelous nightly pudding’s.