- The autumn feels slowed down,
- summer still holds on here, even the light
- seems to last longer than it should
- or maybe I'm using it to the thin edge.
- The moon rolls in the air. I didn't want this child.
- You're the only one I've told.
- I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
- Otto has a calm, complacent way
- of following me with his eyes, as if to say
- Soon you'll have your hands full!
- And yes, I will; this child will be mine
- not his, the failures, if I fail
- will all be mine. We're not good, Clara,
- at learning to prevent these things,
- and once we have a child it is ours.
- But lately I feel beyond Otto or anyone.
- I know now the kind of work I have to do.
- It takes such energy! I have the feeling I'm
- moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,
- in my loneliness. I'm looking everywhere in nature
- for new forms, old forms in new places,
- the planes of an antique mouth, let's say, among the leaves.
- I know and do not know
- what I am searching for.
- Remember those months in the studio together,
- you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,
- I trying to make something of the strange impressions
- assailing me - the Japanese
- flowers and birds on silk, the drunks
- sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,
- those faces...Did we know exactly
- why we were there? Paris unnerved you,
- you found it too much, yet you went on
- with your work...and later we met there again,
- both married then, and I thought you and Rilke
- both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness
- between you. Of course he and I
- have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous
- of him, to begin with, taking you from me,
- maybe I married Otto to fill up
- my loneliness for you.
- Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,
- he believes in women. But he feeds on us,
- like all of them. His whole life, his art
- is protected by women. Which of us could say that?
- Which of us, Clara, hasn't had to take that leap
- out beyond our being women
- to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?
- Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
- Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
- giving birth to the child.
- I couldn't paint or speak or even move.
- My child - I think - survived me. But what was funny
- in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem -
- a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
- I was your friend
- but in the dream you didn't say a word.
- In the dream his poem was like a letter
- to someone who has no right
- to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
- who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don't I dream of you?
- That photo of the two of us - I have it still,
- you and I looking hard into each other
- and my painting behind us. How we used to work
- side by side! And how I've worked since then
- trying to create according to our plan
- that we'd bring, against all odds, our full power
- to every subject. Hold back nothing
- because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies
- in the things we used to talk about:
- how life and death take one another's hands,
- the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.
- And now I feel dawn and the coming day.
- I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
- come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel
- it is myself that kicks inside me,
- myself I must give suck to, love...
- I wish we could have done this for each other
- all our lives, but we can't...
- They say a pregnant woman
- dreams her own death. But life and death
- take one another's hands. Clara, I feel so full
- of work, the life I see ahead, and love
- for you, who of all people
- however badly I say this
- will hear all I say and cannot say.