The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet

the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.

Steam hisses up and up into the night,

which becomes at a stroke the night of the Last Judgment.

From the unseen horizon

and from the very center of my being,

an infinite voice pronounced these things--

things, not words. This is my feeble translation,

time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word:

"Stars, bread, libraries of East and West,

playing-cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars,

a human body to walk with on the earth,

fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death,

shadows for forgetting, mirrors busily multiplying,

cascades in music, gentlest of all time's shapes.

Borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings,

a bronze weight, a copy of the Grettir Saga,

algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood,

days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,

love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering,

dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,

and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy --

all this was given to you, and with it

the ancient nourishment of heroes --

treachery, defeat, humiliation.

In vain have oceans been squandered on you,

in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes.

You have used up the years and they have used up you,

and still, and still, you have not written the poem."

     translated by Alastair Reid

Note:  


(Matthew XXV:30 reads " And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.")