1. Mallarme: Poe's Stone

As what eternity returns him to,
The poet scours, as with a naked blade,
His age — these men embarrassed not to know
The score of death in the strange words he said.

They — reacting like an obscene hydra against
An angel's cleansing the sense of the horde's murmur —
Jeered at his magic as merely something condensed
From the shameful washes of a black mixture.

Hateful the soil, hateful the clouds — O sorrow! —
If our intelligence fail to cultivate
Them into carvings to adorn Poe's stunning monument:

Calm block dropped down here from a far eclipse, let
This granite serve at least to mark the limit
Of blasphemy's black flights crisscrossing tomorrow.

2. Rilke: Likeness of My Father in His Youth

In the eyes: dream.
Forehead communicating
With something distant.
Around the mouth
An extraordinary power of youth
And seductiveness, but a seductiveness minus the smiling.

And in front of the full-dress braid of the trim —
Old-fashioned outfit of nobility —
The ample hilt of the saber, and his two hands,
Which attend, at rest, forced towards nothing.

And very nearly invisible now, as though
What held fast to far things were first to go.

And every other thing is self-concealed
And expunged, as though beyond our understanding
And, out from unfathomable depths, profoundly opaque —

You, fast-fading daguerreotype
In my slower-fading hands.