walking

"Each day I take a different path
now to the river, now to the wood
or to the rocks where roses are

I climb the hills where I look out
but find you nowhere in the light

my beauty and my words are gone
into the air. Our words were right. ..."

- from 'Each day I take ...' by Denise Riley (after Friedrich Hölderlin's 'Wohl geh' ich täglich', written between 1798 and 1800)




"... Blind in the green afterglow of a crimson dress
Poised by a pale wall then gone on out of the light

But the girl at the inn will fade, however intently I stare.
And I go walking again all over the moors to sob

That she is a long way off, which is where we shall always keep her.
No having suffices the heart, which must keep integrally red."

- from 'Goethe on his holidays', by Denise Riley.

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