Gary LeBel
Um Mitternacht (At midnight)
Du musst nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken
~ Friedrich Rückert
The candle burns and flickers. As the rain beats on the roof tiles, roars through the gutters, their sweet young faces return to him in his study, both together and apart as each in kind was loved.
He sits at his desk, the page of white paper before him catching both flame and shadow. It’s eleven-forty. Frau Rückert has long been asleep, he thinks, but she has lain awake listening to the rain, the sad, steady drone of it, its raps and pattering upon the window glass as if the cold grey spirit of the downpour were looking for a way to enter their quiet house
The poet dips his quill and writes the words Um Mitternacht; as his tears fall, they bleed into the ink.
All day long they had avoided speaking of the date and its occasion, a pretense that in previous years was like a marble veil that could neither be drawn nor lifted: it had always been their way. Frau Rückert had spent the day in the garden pruning her roses while he himself had leafed through a grammar of Arabic that had arrived only that morning from Leipzig.
How many times had he heard the music of their children’s light footsteps throughout the house, and how often had they burst into his study only to leap into his arms, his desk strewn with papers, papers he’d plow aside with a sweep of his arm to grant their bright, bounding energies all the space they needed as they sat on the desk before him, the light of his life.
But now, almost midnight, the vigil is nearly over. He buries his head in his arms and weeps, and waits for the sound that will grant them both a reprieve from grieving, that will set their daughters’ spirits free for yet another year, thus ending the day they had chosen to remember them both, midway between their birthdays, for they could not bear mourning them twice in a year’s time.
He waits for the chime of the downstairs clock, as does she in a welter of snowy sheets beneath the quilt she’d embroidered with irises, her pillow soaked with tears.
But the rain … the awful rain…
The tide
will just be rising there
and for you its morning sky will seem
as if a sailor's dream had granted
this luminous world of blue
Notes:
(1) German poet, scholar and Orientalist Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) wrote over four hundred poems expressing his love and the loss of his two daughters to illness in childhood. Composer Gustav Mahler famously set five of these poems to music with his song cycle of 1904, the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). Since the time I first heard them in my early twenties, I return to them occasionally for their poignant beauty and lyricism so that I, who have enjoyed a relatively easy life, may feel empathy for those who have not. The chosen “date” of mourning their daughters, of course, is speculative fiction.
(2) Um Mitternacht is the final song from Mahler’s collection of five Rückert-Lieder, or Songs of Rückert.
(3) Du musst nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken: You must not enfold the night within you.
About the Author
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.