shelter of what it was earlier, before the given moment. The end and accomplishment has its analogue in "dark patience." Patience bears hidden things toward their truth. Its forbearance bears everything toward its descent down into the blue of the ghostly night. The beginning, on the other hand, corresponds to a seeing and minding which gleams golden because it is illuminated by "the golden, the true." This gold and true is reflected in the starry pond of night when Elis on his journey opens his heart to the night (92) :

A golden boat
Sways, Elis, your heart against a lonely sky.

The stranger's boat tosses, playful rather than "timorously" (192), like the boat of those descendants of earliness who still merely follow the stranger. Their boat does not yet reach the level of the pond's surface. It sinks. But where? Does it go under in dKay? No. And into what does it sink? Into empty nothingness? Far from it. One of Trakl's last poems, "Lament" (192), ends with the lines:

Sister of stormy sadness,
Look, a timorous boat goes down
Under stars,
The silent face of the night.

What does this nocturnal silence hold that looks down out of the starlight? Where does this silence itself with its night belong? To apartness. This apartness is more than merely the state in which the boy Elis lives, the state of being dead.

The earliness of stiller childhood, the blue night, the stranger's nighting paths, the soul's nocturnal wing-beat, even the twilight as the gateway to descent: all these belong to apartness.

All these are gathered up into apartness, not afterward but such that apartness unfolds within their already established gathering.

Twilight, night, the stranger's years, his paths, all are called "ghostly" by the poet. The apartness is "ghostly." This word—what does it mean? Its meaning and its use are very old.