stanza, gave us the final indication that apartness is the site of his poetry. That stanza speaks of those wanderers who follow the stranger's path through the ghostly night in order that they may "dwell in its animate blue."

Fish and game soon glide away.
Soon blue soul and long dark journey
Parted us from loved ones. others.

An open region that holds the promise of a dwelling, and provides a dwelling, is what we call a "land." The passage into the stranger's land leads through ghostly twilight, in the evening. This is why the last stanze runs:

Evening changes image. sense.

The land into which the early dead goes down is the land of this evening. The location of the site that gathers Trakl's work into itself is the concealed nature of apartness, and is called "Evening Land," the Occident. This land is older, which is to say, earlier and therefore more promising than the Platonic-Christian land, or indeed than a land conceived in terms of the European West, For apartness is the "first beginning" of a mounting world-year, not the abyss of decay.

The evening land concealed in apartness is not going down: it stays and, as the land of descent into the ghostly night, awaits those who will dwell in it. The land of descent is the transition into the beginning of the dawn concealed within it.

If we keep these thoughts in mind, we surely cannot then dismiss as mere coincidence the fact that two of Trakl's poems speak explicitly of the land of evening. One bears the title "Evening Land" or "Occident" (165) the other is called "Occidental Song" (133): it sings the same as does the "Song of the Departed," and begins with a call that inclines in wonder:

O the nocturnal wing-beat of the soul:

The line ends with a colon that includes everything that follows, even to the transition from descent into ascent. At that point in the poem, just before the last two lines, there is a