Opium heals,
applying a chemical bellows
to the Vital Heat;
a golden silence.
At what cost!
Matchstick limbs out of Auschwitz,
fever-bright eyes.
Such sweet poison!

Music heals,
early music;
Greek Olympian music.
Clusters of notes with open phrasing
dancing on the surface of the Void
and tumbling endlessly in,
leaving no trace.

The unmatchable healer
is Silence itself.
Into it everything
subsides;
half-formed phrases,
the concatenation of thought,
the sword-play of tongues.
All vanish
like snowflakes
in a raging furnace.

He who has found
the silence,
which lies behind sound,
as the sky lies
behind planet,  star
and cosmic dust,
he does not pursue
the clatter of sound.