To Himself

Adapted from Leopardi

My exhausted heart 
it’s time for you to rest.
That grand deceit,
a love you thought could may well last forever,
and all desire for further pretense, gone.
Be still at last. The wasted beats,
the years, the world about you
is hardly worth such effort.
For here is bitterness and boredom and mud
and nothing more.
So rest, and then despair
that final time. Embrace at last the gift
our kind deserves. Scorn nature now,
that common brute, the power
that stands behind the scenes and rules the world.
The final vanity, the vanity of all.

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