I don't remember the word I wished to say

I don’t remember the word I wished to say.
The blind swallow returns to the hall of shadow,
on shorn wings, with the translucent ones to play.
The song of night is sung without memory, though.

No birds. No blossoms on the dried flowers.
The manes of night’s horses are translucent.
An empty boat drifts on the naked river.
Lost among grasshoppers the word’s quiescent.

It swells slowly like a shrine, or a canvas sheet,
hurling itself down, mad, like Antigone,
or falls, now, a dead swallow at our feet
with a twig of greenness, and a Stygian sympathy.

O, to bring back the diffidence of the intuitive caress,
and the full delight of recognition.
I am so fearful of the sobs of The Muses,
the mist, the bell-sounds, perdition.

Mortal creatures can love and recognise: sound may
pour out, for them, through their fingers, and overflow:
I don’t remember the word I wished to say,
and a fleshless thought returns to the house of shadow.

The translucent one speaks in another guise,
always the swallow, dear one, Antigone....
on the lips the burning of black ice,
and Stygian sounds in the memory.

Osip Mandelstam

Note (A.S. Kline): Mandelstam uses the term Aonides for the Muses, so called because their haunt of Mount Helicon was in Aonia an early name for Boeotia. (See Ovid Metamorphoses V333, and VI 2). The Antigone referred to may be the daughter of Laomedon turned into a bird, Ovid VI 93 says a stork, rather than Sophocles’s Antigone. The crane or stork was associated with the alphabet. (See Graves: The White Goddess). In dark times the word is a bird of the underworld communing with the shades of the dead. Recognition is a key word for Mandelstam, see the poem 'Tristia'. He considers himself no longer mortal, beyond the living, and therefore inspired by the darkness, and not the light of love and recognition.