"

I should disappear,
someone tells me, in there,
though, knocked down, I still
don’t disappear, wanting
to flee once more
to the terrace.

I have not remained silent
because silence is good, is beautiful.
I simply had nothing more to say.

I had my standards, I was silent
because I had nothing more to say.
Standards, that’s a good an-
alogy, a pound weighs
a pound, a quantity is
a quantity, I was I, I was hardly
afraid, I was therefore
no longer myself, there being nothing more
for the self and your insatiable
society to feed on, my
times.

I had everything and now have
lost everything, first my standards.
I am cut off from myself
and from everything else.
I didn’t know that a person
could manifest this pain with
a dream, that one could
die, that the heavens
can collapse, and a heaven
can disappear into thin air,
my immortal heart.
I didn’t know that
every murder remains
under one’s skin
and night and day
the sick with their
exhausted lonely
whimpers are the murderer’s
comrades, or that one
retreats into such a hell
and that the valley of sorrow
is one’s only
landscape.
I didn’t know that one
can no longer see
and hear,
everything lost,
gone for good
with a leap out
the window, a
mark on the throat, a
crucified body
and not enough acquittals,
not enough.

I am begging and crying,
you see, but I don’t have
the grand music
that leads one out who can’t find
the exit in sleep,
in death.
Transfiguration—not for us,
but for others, those figures
who are purer,
who are where I cannot be,
since in fact I am here
upon this paper, and in
the word that I write,
for as the paper rustles,
I cannot be quiet,
and I rustle along with the scraps
on the way there, inward, where
someone wraps up a bloody knife
so that no one
sees.

"

Ingeborg Bachmann, “[I should disappear.]. From Darkness Spoken.