A Pallid Laundry Maiden.
You edge along the river’s scythe-curve, chipped and studded with willows and red gums. Thrusting your grief deep into your pockets, you open your body’s sluices to the river’s sensual flow. Here, at the fringes, you can release your burdens to the current, and let life flow towards you, bringing what it brings. The water, with its jewelled glamour, enters you and curls around your heart. And yet, the heat of your brain remains unsoothed. The confluence sizzles inside you. Pressure in the head, like the diameter of your skull just shrank by half an inch. Grey matter presses into fluid, into bone. Heat and water pull you hard in opposite directions, painfully taut, yet perfectly still on the riverbank. The river flows on.
4. A Pallid Laundry Maiden
A pallid laundry maiden
washes faded sheets by night;
naked arms of silver-white
stretching out across the water.
Gentle winds creep through the clearing,
softly rippling the stream.
A pallid laundry maiden
washes faded sheets by night.
And this gentle maid of heaven,
tenderly caressed by branches,
spreads across the gloomy meadows
all her linen, spun with light –
a pallid laundry maiden.
4. Ein blasse Wäscherin
Eine blasse Wäscherin
Wäscht zur Nachtzeit bleiche Tücher;
Nackte, silberweiße Arme
Streckt sie nieder in die Flut.
Durch die Lichtung schleichen Winde,
Leis bewegen sie den Strom.
Eine blasse Wäscherin
Wäscht zur Nachtzeit bleiche Tücher.
Und die sanfte Magd des Himmels,
Von den Zweigen zart umschmeichelt,
Breitet auf die dunklen Wiesen
ihre lichtgewobnen Linnen -
Eine blasse Wäscherin.