Soma
Resources => Poetry [Public] => Topic started by: nichi on September 20, 2006, 09:40:29 AM
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I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
~Rilke~
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beautiful - a good one
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Black Cat
A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.
~Rilke
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The Lovers
See how in their veins all becomes spirit;
into each other they mature and grow.
Like axles, their forms tremblingly orbit,
round which it whirls, bewitching and aglow.
Thirsters, and they receive drink,
watchers, and see: they receive sight.
Let them into one another sink
so as to endure each other outright.
Rilke
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Sunset
Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs —
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
~Rainer Maria Rilke~
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As Once The Winged Energy
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.
~Rainer Maria Rilke~
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This is one of my top five favorite Rilke poems, and I think its cause its sort of true, and sort of sad at the same time.
Song
Rilke
You, whom I do not tell that all night long
I lie weeping,
whose very being makes me feel wanting
like a cradle.
You, who do not tell me, that you lie awake
thinking of me:--
what, if we carried all these longings within us
without ever being overwhelmed by them,
letting them pass?
Look at these lovers, tormented by love,
when first they begin confessing,
how soon they lie!
You make me feel alone. I try imagining:
one moment it is you, then it's the soaring wind;
a fragrance comes and goes but never lasts.
Oh, within my arms I lost all whom I loved!
Only you remain, always reborn again.
For since I never held you, I hold you fast.
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Beautiful!
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I know. I love Rilke. I wish I could've met him in person - Ive never read anything by him I didnt like.
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Pathways
Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.
I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.
~Rilke
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Ignorant Before the Heavens of My Life
Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.
~Rilke
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Palm
Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.
~Rilke
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Buddha in Glory
Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.
~Rilke
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Silent Friend of Many Distances, Feel
Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face
grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.
In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.
And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
~Rilke
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To Music
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of motal hearts.
Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? --: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.
~Rilke
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You, you only, exist
You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all you suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes a festival!
~Rilke
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Gong
No longer for ears...: sound
which, like a deeper ear,
hears us, who only seem
to be hearing. Reversal of spaces.
Projection of innermost worlds
into the Open..., temple
before their birth, solution
saturated with gods
that are almost insoluble...: Gong!
Sum of all silence, which
acknowledges itself to itself,
thunderous turning-within
of what is struck dumb in itself,
duration pressed from time passing,
star re-liquefied...: Gong!
You whom one never forgets,
who gave birth to herself in loss,
festival no longer grasped,
wine on invisible lips,
storm in the pillar that upholds,
wanderer's plunge on the path,
our treason, to everything...: Gong!
~Rilke
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We Say Release, and Energy, and Roses
We say release, and radiance, and roses,
and echo upon everything that's known;
and yet, behind the world our names enclose is
the nameless: our true archetype and home.
The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,
the field is humble, and the forest proud;
but over everthing we say, inhuman,
moves the forever-undetermined god.
We grow up; but the world remains a child.
Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.
And sometimes we appear to be the final
exam they must succeed on. And they do.
~Rilke
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Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.
~Rilke
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Pathways
Pathways
Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.
I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.
~Rilke
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You, you only, exist
You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes a festival!
~Rilke
Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Poetry Chaikhana (http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/)
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You, beloved, who were lost
before the beginning, who never came,
I do not know which sounds might be precious to you.
No longer do I try to recognize you, when, as a surging wave,
something is about to manifest. All the huge
images in me, the deeply-sensed far-away landscapes,
cities and towers and bridges and un-
suspected turns of the path,
the powerful life of lands
once filled with the presence of gods:
all rise with you to find clear meaning in me,
your, forever, elusive one.
You, who are all
the gardens I've ever looked upon,
full of promise. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost stepped
towards me, thoughtfully. Sidestreets I happened upon,—
you had just passed through them,
and sometimes, in the small shops of sellers, the mirrors
were still dizzy with you and gave back, frightened,
my too sudden form.—Who is to say if the same
bird did not resound through us both
yesterday, separate, in the evening?
~Rilke
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Imaginary Life Journey
First a childhood, limitless and without
renunciation or goals. O unselfconscious joy.
Then suddenly terror, barriers, schools, drudgery,
and collapse into temptation and loss.
Defiance. The one bent becomes the bender,
and thrusts upon others that which it suffered.
Loved, feared, rescuer, fighter, winner
and conqueror, blow by blow.
And then alone in cold, light, open space,
yet still deep within the mature erected form,
a gasping for the clear air of the first one, the old one . . .
Then God leaps out from behind his hiding place.
~Rilke
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We are the driving ones.
Ah, but the step of time:
think of it as a dream
in what forever remains.
All that is hurrying
soon will be over with;
only what lasts can bring
us to the truth.
Young men, don't put your trust
into the trials of flight,
into the hot and quick.
All things already rest:
darkness and morning light,
flower and book.
~Rilke
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Falling Stars
Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
~Rilke
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I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live
it through.
while the things of the world still do not move:
the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full
of silence,
the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.
I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.
~Rilke
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World was in the face of the beloved--,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.
~Rilke
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Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.
It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor --from breast to knees--
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
~Rilke
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The First Elegy
~*~
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.
Yes--the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.
Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; remember: the hero lives on;
even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back into herself,
as if there were not enough strength to create them a second time.
Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough
so that any girl deserted by her beloved might be inspired by that fierce example of soaring,
objectless love and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?"
Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow more fruitful for us?
Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and,
quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.
For there is no place where we can remain.
Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened:
until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground;
yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn't notice at all: so complete was their listening.
Not that you could endure God's voice--far from it.
But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.
Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church in Naples or Rome,
quietly come to address you?
Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,
as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.
What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death--
which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to leave even one's own first name behind,
forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,
and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys,
as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.
But we, who do need such great mysteries,
we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth--:
could we exist without them?
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;
and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god has suddenly left forever,
the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Second Elegy
~*~
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,
almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you.
Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance,
stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;
(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us:
our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.
Who are you?
Early successes, Creation's pampered favorites,
mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,--
pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light,
corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence,
shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone:
mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face
and gather it back, into themselves, entire.
But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away;
from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume.
Though someone may tell us: "Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room,
the whole springtime is filled with you . . . "--what does it matter? he can't contain us,
we vanish inside him and around him.
And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them?
Appearance ceaselessly rises in their face, and is gone.
Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food.
O smile, where are you going?
O upturned glance: new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart . . .
alas, but that is what we are.
Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then?
Do the angels really reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves,
or sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace of our essence in it as well?
Are we mixed in with their features even as slightly as that vague look
in the faces of pregnant women?
They do not notice it (how could they notice) in their swirling return to themselves.
Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air.
For it seems that everything hides us.
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.
You hold each other. Where is your proof?
Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other,
or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.
That gives me a slight sensation.
But who would dare to exist, just for that?
You, though, who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you:
"No more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance,
like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged:
I am asking you about us.
I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves,
because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;
because underneath it you feel pure duration.
So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances,
the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the garden:
lovers, are you the same?
When you lift yourselves up to each other's mouth and your lips join,
drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.
Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders
that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?
Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos.
These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far,
this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us.
But that is the gods' affair."
If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,
our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.
Four our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it,
gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,
measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.
-
The Third Elegy
~*~
To rhapsodize the beloved is one thing.
It is another, alas, to call forth
the shameless River God of the blood
from his hidden places.
What does her young lover,
face dissolving in the distance,
know of the Lord of Lust
who erects himself, despite
her attempted soothing,
from the depths of solitude,
godhead adrip with unknown essences,
blind at times to her very existence,
rousing night to a continuous riot?
O, blood's Neptune, O terrible trident,
O, dark wind of his breast
sounding the spiral conch!
Listen to the night's hollow ring.
Is it not, O stars, from you
that the lover's lust for his
beloved's face comes streaming?
Is not the substance of his
secret vision of her purest
inner being drawn from your
virgin constellations?
You are not the one, alas, nor
was it his mother, who lent that
arch of expectation to his brow.
Not from you, attentive girl,
nor from your kiss, did his lips
achieve a more fruitful curve.
Do you expect your gentle step
to shake the ground he stands upon,
you who waft like morning breezes?
It is true you startled his heart
but terrors more ancient rocked him,
awakened by your touch.
Call as you will, you cannot free him
from those dark companions,
though he himself desires escape.
Succeeding, he throws off their weight
and settles in the bower of your heart.
Discovering the seed of himself within you,
he begins to manifest his individual being.
But does he ever actually begin?
Mother, you made him small.
In you was his beginning.
To you was he new
and above the new eyes
you spread the friendly world,
barring disturbing strangeness.
Ah! Where are the years fled
when your slender silhouette
was all he needed to obliterate
the impending waves of chaos?
You made it all all-right,
hid true darknesses and lighted,
with the sweetness of your heart,
the suspicious corners of his room;
rendered them harmless,
mixing human breath into
their chill, alien wind.
His nightlamp was your presence,
not the candle in the darkness,
but the glow of friendly love.
You explained each creak with a smile
which implicitly stated foreknowledge
that the alloted time for the
floorboard to assert itself had come.
He believed you and was soothed.
All this your presence,
at his bidding, settled.
His tall, cloaked shadow of a fate
slipped back into the closet,
for the moment foiled-
or mingled with the
ripples of his curtains.
Lying there rescued-as your
sweet defending presence
drowsily dissolved
into gentle sleep-
he seemed so secure, yet
who could truly contain
the internal floods of
his fearsome origin?
There were no doubts
in this sweet dreamer...
but in nightmare or in fever:
another matter!
How this new sprout grew,
entangled with the roots
of olden things;
with strangling vines among
prowling ancient predators!
He was the born lover of this
internal primeval wilderness.
Among the rotting trunks of
deposed giants, his heart sprouted
green as the spring and loving.
Loving, he left, descending through
the shoots of his own roots, on out...
out where the grand source of his
little birth already lay outmoded.
Loving, still, he waded into the
depths of vast arroyos flowing
with the blood of his fathers;
where every cohort terror
lay winking in complicity. Yes,
the face of horror smiled upon him.
Seldom, O Mother, have you,
yourself, so sweetly smiled.
What smiled at him, he loved-
how could he help it?
He loved it before he ever knew you-
it was part and portion of your
embryonic waters, upon which he floated.
Observe: a season does not contain
our whole lifetime, as with a lilac.
When we love, a slower sap,
thicker than centuries,
courses through our embrace.
O my love, consider: the child
we would fain conceive was never
an individual but a multitude,
the personification of the fathers
lying in our depths like mountains
leveled to the lowest summits; like
the barren riverbeds of mothers past-
the entire soundless panorama,
whether cloudy or clear,
of mutual destiny.
Before you,
sweet lover,
this was...
And you, yourself, are you
able to know anything of
the eternal darkness which
you stirred in your lover?
How much of his forefathers'
being claimed him?
What women, coveting him,
despised you?
What dark jealousy of
unknown lovers have you
awakened in his veins?
Dead children reach out to you...
Ever so gently, perform with love
some ordinary task before him.
Lead him to the margin of the garden.
Show him the counterweight of darkness.....
Stop him.....
-
The Fourth Elegy
~*~
O Trees of Life,
when does your winter fall?
Strangers to instinct,
we lack the focus and
the harmony which guide
the southbound birds.
Overtaken and tardy, we
thrust ourselves upon the wind;
fall out of the sky
into icily indifferent ponds.
We wither as we blossom,
knowing both states at once.
Somewhere lions roam,
knowing nothing of weakness
in the hour of their majesty.
But we cannot focus on
a single object without
worrying about another.
Conflict is our essence.
Aren't lovers always
crowding one another,
despite mutual longing
for wide open spaces,
homestead and plentiful hunting?
As when a canvas is carefully
stretched and primed to receive
a spontaneous sketch,
the better to offset it,
we do not observe the
background of emotion,
only what is splashed upon it.
Who has not sat frightened
before the heart's curtain,
watching it rise upon
a scene of farewell?
So well understood:
the familiar garden,
lightly swaying.
Then came the dancer.
No! Not that one!
No matter how lightly he flies,
he is only a costumed actor,
an ordinary man who takes his bow
then hurries homeward, entering
through the kitchen door.
I will no longer endure
these half filled masks!
Better the completeness
of an honest puppet.
No matter the stuffing and
the wire frame; the painted
face of pure appearance.
Here I stay!
Though they cut the lights and
declare there is no more...
though a grey mist of emptiness
curls from the stage...
though my silent ancestors
no longer sit beside me
-neither that woman nor the
boy with the squint brown eye-
here I stay!
I still may watch.
Am I not right to do so, Father?
You I ask, whose cup of life
seemed bitter after tasting mine, so
vital with the bouquet of youthful promise
but bearing a troubling aftertaste.
You often searched the depths
of my unfocused eyes for
signs of my uncanny future.
Am I not right, O Father,
who, so oft since dying,
hath roused thyself from
vast eternal peace to shudder
at my crumb of fate?
I pray it may be so.
Am I not right?
And you, dear ones, who
loved the first stirrings
of my love inside yourselves:
am I not correct?
You, beloved ones, whose faces
faded in my very gaze
to distances in which
I never existed,
am I not right to sit here,
staring at the puppet stage,
if only to gaze so steadily
that an angel must arise,
obedient to balance,
to startle the stuffed skins
into living action.
Angel with marionettes!
Actual theatre at last!
What our presence has divided
now is in our presence joined.
Only now do the interstellar seasons
correspond to the seasons of the soul.
Above and beyond an angel frolics.
Do only the dying notice how vapid
and pretentious are all of our
accomplishments here, where
nothing is allowed to be
as it is meant to be?
O childhood hours, the shadows of
whose shapes were not yet mere
repetitions of shades past-
when that which gleamed ahead
was not yet the future.
Growing, we often wished we were
already grown, half to please those
for whom nothing but their own
maturity remained.
Yet, when alone, we played
with eternal toys and stood
enchanted in the breach between
our playthings and the world:
a place primordially prepared
for an immaculate advent.
Who can show a child as he really is;
set him starlike in his proper firmament
and place the rod of distant measure
in his hand?
Who bakes the gray bread of his death
and leaves it hardening, sharp as a
sweet apple's inedible core,
in his rounded mouth?.....Murderers
are easy enough to understand.
But to hold death,
the whole of death,
even before life is fairly begun-
to contain it gently
and without complaint-
that defies understanding.
-
Yeah he's great isnt he? A 20th century mystic.
What fascinates me about Rilke is, poetry just poured out of him endlessly, and it was ALL good! The Duino elegies being supreme of course. There's more but I figured id try to not flood him quite yet. But yeah, he could go on and on yet each prose was always so fresh. I read him constantly.
-
The Fifth Elegy
~*~
Who are these rambling acrobats,
less secure than even we;
twisted since childhood
(for benefit of whom?)
by an unappeasable will?
A will which wrings, bends,
swings, twists and catapults,
catching them when they fall
through slick and polished air
to a threadbare carpet worn
ever thinner by their leaping:
lost carpet of the great beyond,
stuck like a bandage to an earth
bruised by suburban skies.
Ensemble,
their bodies trace a vague
capital "C" for Creation...
captured by an inevitable grip
which bends even the mightiest,
as King Augustus the Strong
folded a pewter plate for laughs.
Around this center
the Rose of Looking
blossoms and sheds.
Around this pounding pestle,
this self pollinating pistle
producing petals of ennui,
blooms of customary apathy
speciously shine with
superfluous smiles.
There: the wrinkled, dried up Samson,
becomes, in old age, a drummer-
too small for the skin which looks
as though it once held two of him.
The other must be dead and buried
while this half fares alone,
deaf and somewhat addled
within the widowed skin.
There: the young man who seems
the very offspring of a union
between a stiff neck and a nun,
braced and buckled,
full of strength and
innocent simplicity.
O, you, children,
delivered to the infant Pain
as a toy to amuse it,
during some extended
illness of its childhood.
You, boy, discover
a hundred times a day
what green apples know,
dropping off a tree created
through mutual interactions
(coursing through spring,
summer and, swift as water,
fall, all in a flash)
to bounce, thud, upon the grave.
Sometimes, in fleeting glances
toward your seldom tender mother,
affection almost surfaces,
only to submerge as suddenly
beneath your face...a shy,
half-tried expression...
and then the man claps,
commanding you to leap again
and before any pain can
straddle your galloping heart,
your stinging soles outrace it,
chasing a brief pair of
actual tears to your eyes,
still blindly smiling.
O angel, pluck that
small flower of healing!
Craft a vessel to contain it!
Set it amongst joys not
yet vouchsafed us.
Upon that fair herbal jar,
in flowing, fancy letters,
inscribe: "Subrisio Saltat."
...Smile of Acrobat...
And you, little sweetheart,
silently overlept by
the most exciting joys-
perhaps your skirthems
are happy in your stead,
or maybe the green metallic silk,
stretched tight by budding breasts,
feels itself sufficiently indulged.
You,
displaying, for all to see,
the fruit which tips the
swaying scales of balance,
suspended from the shoulders.
Where...O where is that place,
held in my heart, before they'd
all achieved such expertise,
were apt still to tumble asunder
like poorly fitted animals mating...
where the barbell still seems heavy,
where the discus wobbles and topples
from a badly twirled baton?
Then: Presto! in this
exasperating nowhere:
the unspeakable space appears where
purity of insufficiency transforms
into overly efficient emptiness.
Where the monumental bill of charges,
in final arbitration, totals zero.
Plazas, O plazas of Paris,
endless showcase, where
Madame Death the Milliner
twists and twines the
ribbons of restlessness,
designing ever new frills,
bows, rustles and brocades,
dyed in truthless colors,
to deck the trashy
winter hats of fate.
Angel! Were there an unknown place
where, upon an uncanny carpet, lovers
could disport themselves in ways
here inconceivable-daring ariel maneuvers
of the heart, scaling high plateaus of passion,
ladders leaning one against the other,
planted trembling upon the void...
Were there such a place, would their
performance prove convincing to an audience
of the innumerable and silent dead?
Would not these dead toss down their
final, hoarded, secret coins of joy,
legal tender of eternity, before the
couple smiling on that detumescent carpet,
fully satisfied?
-
The Sixth Elegy
~*~
Fig tree, I've long found it significant
that you omit, almost entirely, to flower
but, early in the season press, untrumpeted,
your purest secret into resolute fruition.
Through your arched boughs the sap is driven
downward, then forced up, fountainlike,
where, hardly waking, it bursts from sleep
into the bliss of sweetest achievement.
Look-how Jupiter becomes the swan.
.....But, sadly, we hang on.
Our glory is all in the flowering.
We press into our final tardy fruit
already swindled.
Few are moved so boldly by the
impetus to action that they stand
already glowing in fulness of heart
when, like a soft night breeze,
the temptation to flower brushes their
youthful lips and strokes their eyes.
That is the attitude of heroes-
and of those elected for an early grave,
veins trained differently by Death the Gardener.
They dash ahead of their own smiles like
the galloping team of conquering Pharoah
in the gently sculpted friezes at Karnak.
Wondrously akin are the
young dead and the hero.
Survival is the mission of neither.
His is the ascent unending
through amorphous constellations
of everlasting personal peril.
Few could overtake him there.
But Fate, to us so mute,
toward him bends inspired,
singing the hero on to meet
her roaring storm in
his cataclysmic world.
I hear none like him.
Suddenly the river of wind
rushes through me, bearing
his voice of muted thunder.
Then do I despair of my longing for
lost youth with future hope intact,
leaning on arms unmolded yet
to read of Samson: how his mother
gave birth at first to nothing,
then-to everything.
O Mother, was he not, unborn, a hero?
Did his peremptory decisions
not begin while still within you?
Thousands broiled in your womb,
wishing to become him.
But observe: he chose one thing,
disdained another and by the
power of choice prevailed.
If ever he broke mighty columns,
it was in quitting the world of your body
to confront the more constricted world
where he continued to act and choose.
O mothers of heroes-
O fonts of storm whipped rivers!
Gorges where tearful virgins have
plunged from the heart's sheer cliff,
as sacrifice to the son!
Whenever the hero stormed
through the way stations of love,
each heart that beat for him
pushed him on beyond that heart,
where, turning away, he stood,
at smile's end-transfigured.
-
The Seventh Elegy
~*~
Wooing no more, no more shall wooing,
voice grown beyond it, be the nature
of your cry-though the cry be pure,
as of a bird when lifted by the
spiraling season-nearly forgetting
that it is a simple fretful creature,
not a solitary heart tossed into
the brightness of intimate skies.
Like him would you woo, so purely
that, all unseen, you might awaken
a silent lover, arousing in her,
ever so slowly, an answering call,
kindled by your own bright passion
into a complementary flame.
O and springtime would take hold
and carry it everywhere until no
cavern nor crannie could fail to
echo your annunciation: the soft
first question of the frail flute
magnified in the limpid stillness
of a daytime of entire agreement.
Then up the ladder of your song,
rise to the temple of the future
discovered, on a time, in dream.
Then the trill-a geyser gathering
its spent streams back into itself,
in recirculation of playful promise
and still, ahead of you, the summer.
Not only each and every sun
of summer at a single rising;
not only the way they steal
dawn's gold into high noon...
Not only the days themselves
which roll so grandly
over constellated trees
be they never so gentle
in amongst the blossoms;
not only the ardent zeal of
each of these unfolded forces,
nor only the footpaths
through twilight meadows,
not these alone, nor the
clarity of breath in the wake
of an afternoon thunderstorm;
not only the approach of sleep
with its omens in tow...
but these NIGHTS!
Heights of the summer's nights,
stars above and stars
of Earth besides:
O to be dead at last and
at long last eternally to
know the stars...
the stars! How, how, how
can they ever be forgotten?
I called my love.
She came, but not alone.
From out of unsecured graves
other girls arose and gathered round.
How could my call, once sounded,
be limited to one?
These unfinished ones
seek again the Earth.
O children, one thing
fully learned here is
fit harvest for a lifetime.
Destiny is only the
dense residue of childhood.
Often, if truth be known,
you caught up with the beloved,
short of breath from joy of the race,
panting for further chase
into entire freedom.
To be here at all is a glory.
You knew it, maidens,
even those of you seemingly
passed over, sinking into
the city's meanest streets,
festering alleys choked with
trash and stinking of excretions.
Each of you had her hour,
or if not an hour,
an instant, at least,
between two moments when
life burst into flower.
Every blessed petal.
Your veins throbbed with it.
But we so soon forget what
our laughing neighbor neither
applauds nor envies.
We desire that they be admired,
but even the most visible
of joys cannot be seen
until transformed-within.
Nowhere, beloved, does any
world exist save that within.
Life spends itself in
the act of transformation,
dissolving, bit by bit,
the world as it appeared.
Where stood a solid house
now stands a mental construct,
entirely conceptual, as though
its rafters supported a
rooftop in the very brain.
The spirit of our time has raised
storehouses of infernal powers,
edifices shapeless as the primal force
he wrenches from creation.
Temples are unknown to him.
It is we who try in secret
to perpetuate such wasteful
luxuriance of the heart.
Yes, if one thing survives
before which we genuflected,
which we served or worshiped,
it passes intact into the invisible.
Many, perceiving it no more,
fail to seize the chance to
build it up anew, with greater
pillars and more commanding statues
than in days of yore-within!
Each sluggish revolution of the world
leaves its dispossessed-heirs neither
of things past nor of those impending.
The immediate future is distant for man.
This should not confuse but confirm
the needfulness of preserving those forms
we still can recognize.
This once stood amongst us,
here in the province of
Fate the Great Annihilator,
in the very midst,
knowing not whither nor whence,
firm in its existence,
calling down stars from
their secure heavens
to stand in witness.
Angel, behold the vision.
I will show it to you-Voila!
Gather it into your eternal sight
where it may at last endure,
upright and redeemed:
pillars, monoliths, the Sphinx,
the gray cathedral's striving thrust
o'er some strange and fading city.
Is it not miraculous?
Attend well, O angel;
This is what we are,
O Great One.
Be thou herald of these wonders!
My own scant breath will not
suffice to celebrate it fully.
We have not, after all, failed
to employ our assigned spaces,
these generous spaces of our own.
(How fearfully vast they must be-
aeons of our feelings
have not overfilled them.)
Was not a single tower great?
O angel, indeed it was,
even by your measure.
The cathedral at Chartres was great-
music rose higher still,
quite surpassing us.
Even a girl in love, at night,
alone by her window...
didn't she reach to your knee?
Do not think I woo thee, angel!
Should I do so, you would not be moved,
so full of conflict is my cry.
Against such utter counter force
you cannot prevail. My call is like
an open hand thrust out to seize,
to defend, to warn off-while you,
unattainable, receed far beyond its grasp.
-
Autumn
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.
-
Autumn Day
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.
Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now will not build one
anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long
time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.
-
THE EIGHTH DUINO ELEGY
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Animals see the unobstructed
world with their whole eyes.
But our eyes, turned back upon
themselves, encircle and
seek to snare the world,
setting traps for freedom.
The faces of the beasts
show what truly IS to us:
we who up-end the infant and
force its sight to fix upon
things and shapes, not the
freedom that they occupy,
that openess which lies so deep
within the faces of the animals,
free from death!
We alone face death.
The beast, death behind and
God before, moves free through
eternity like a river running.
Never for one day do we
turn from forms to face
that place of endless purity
blooming flowers forever know.
Always a world for us, never
the nowhere minus the no:
that innocent, unguarded
space which we could breathe,
know endlessly, and never require.
A child, at times, may lose
himself within the stillness
of it, until rudely ripped away.
Or one dies and IS the place.
As death draws near,
one sees death no more, rather
looks beyond it with, perhaps,
the broader vision of the beasts.
Lovers, serving only to obstruct
one another's view of it,
approach the place with awe...
as if by accident, it appears
to each behind that precise spot
before which the other stands...
neither can slip behind the other
and so, again, the world returns.
We behold creation's face as though
reflected in a mirror
misted with our breath.
Sometimes a speechless beast
lifts its docile head
and looks right through us.
This is destiny: to be opposites,
always and only to face
one another and nothing else.
Could that surefooted beast,
approaching from a direction
different than our own, aquire
the mental knack to think as do we,
he would spin us round
and drag us with him.
But he is without end unto himself:
devoid of comprehension,
unselfscrutinized, pure
as his outgoing glance.
We see future; he sees
eternal completion.
Himself in all.
Even so, within the alert warmth
of that animal, the weight and care
of one great sadness dwells.
He is not exempt from an unclear
memory-which subdues us as well:
the notion that what we seek was once
closer and truer by far than now...
and infinitely tender.
Here... distances unending.
There... a gentle breathing.
After that first home, this one
seems windstruck and degenerate.
O bliss of the diminutive:
creature born from a particular womb
into womb perpetual.
O delight of the mite who
leaps on, embryonic, though
his wedding day impends!
All is womb to him.
But observe the lesser
certainty of the birds
who seem to know both
circumstances, by
very birthright, like
some Etruscan soul rising from
the cadaver of a sarcophagus
sculpted with its tenant's face.
Imagine the general bafflement
of anything born of the womb
and required to take flight!
Frightened by its very self, it
cuts the air with fractured arcs,
jagged as bat tracks, cracking
the porcelain sky of evening.
We are, above all, eternal spectators
looking upon, never from,
the place itself. We are the
essence of it. We construct it.
It falls apart. We reconstruct it
and fall apart ourselves.
Who formed us thus:
that always, despite
our aspirations, we wave
as though departing?
Like one lingering to look,
from a high final hill,
out over the valley he
intends to leave forever,
we spend our lives saying
goodbye.
-
World was in the face of the beloved--
but suddenly it poured out and was gone
world is outside, world cannot be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didnt I drink
world, so near that I could almost taste it?
Ah, I drank, Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and drinking, I myself ran over.
-
Abishag
http://www.youtube.com/v/jJcHEwdS6PU&hl=en_US&fs=1&
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJcHEwdS6PU&feature=sub
-
The future: time's excuse
to frighten us; too vast
a project, too large a morsel
for the heart's mouth.
Future, who won't wait for you?
Everyone is going there.
It suffices you to deepen
the absence that we are.
-
Oh that's good.
-
Buddha in Glory
Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.
By Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 - 1926)
English version by Stephen Mitchell
-
Pathways
Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.
I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.
~Rilke
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUUKsabFV3o
-
A Mountain Meditation
The birds have disappeared
into the sky,
and now the last cloud
is melting away.
We sit together,
the mountain and me
until
only the mountain
remains.
If the angel deigns to come
it will be because you have convinced her,
not by tears but by your humble resolve
to be always beginning; to be a beginner.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
-
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?
Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
(In Praise of Mortality, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
-
For your sake poets sequester themselves,
gather images to churn the mind,
journey forth, ripening with metaphor,
and all their lives they are so alone...
And painters paint their pictures only
that the world, so transient as you made it,
can be given back to you,
to last forever.
All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa
some woman has long since ripened like wine,
and the enduring feminine is held there
through all the ages.
Those who create are like you.
They long for the eternal.
They say, Stone, be forever!
And that means: be yours.
And lovers also gather your inheritance.
They are the poets of one brief hour.
They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile
as if creating it anew, more beautiful.
Awakening desire, they make a place
where pain can enter;
that's how growing happens.
They bring suffering along with their laughter,
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger's arms.
They let the riddles pile up and then they die
the way animals die, without making sense of it.
But maybe in those who come after,
their green life will ripen;
it's then that you will inherit the love
to which they gave themselves so blindly, as in a sleep.
Thus the overflow from things
pours into you.
Just as a fountain's higher basins
spill down like strands of loosened hair
into the lowest vessel,
so streams the fullness into you,
when things and thoughts cannot contain it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
-
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened
by Rainer Maria Rilke
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Original Language German
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened.
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.
Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praying as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.
Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
The non-being inside you allows you to vibrate
in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.
To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.
-
Buddha in Glory
Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.
Rilke
-
rilke i found when i read the time travelers wife. the wife loved rilke and many poems of his are throughout the book. reading the book, cause of rilke, make it ethreal. since then, he has become my favorite poet, and now on my bookshelf, sits a collection of his works.
-
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition shut out
from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds
and deep with the winds of homecoming.
~Rainer Maria Rilke~
-
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
-
"Death" by Rainer Maria Rilke
Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize,
unbearable pain throughout this body's fabric:
as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee:
the wood that long resisted the advancing flames
which thou kept flaring, I now am nourishinig
and burn in thee.
My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury
has turned into a raging hell that is not from here.
Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted
the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,
so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,
while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.
Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?
Memories I do not seize and bring inside.
O life! O living! O to be outside!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.
-
Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
Rainer Maria Rilke
-
For your sake poets sequester themselves
By Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875 - 1926)
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
For your sake poets sequester themselves,
gather images to churn the mind,
journey forth, ripening with metaphor,
and all their lives they are so alone...
And painters paint their pictures only
that the world, so transient as you made it,
can be given back to you,
to last forever.
All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa
some woman has long since ripened like wine,
and the enduring feminine is held there
through all the ages.
Those who create are like you.
They long for the eternal.
They say, Stone, be forever!
And that means: be yours.
And lovers also gather your inheritance.
They are the poets of one brief hour.
They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile
as if creating it anew, more beautiful.
Awakening desire, they make a place
where pain can enter;
that's how growing happens.
They bring suffering along with their laughter,
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger's arms.
They let the riddles pile up and then they die
the way animals die, without making sense of it.
But maybe in those who come after,
their green life will ripen;
it's then that you will inherit the love
to which they gave themselves so blindly, as in a sleep.
Thus the overflow from things
pours into you.
Just as a fountain's higher basins
spill down like strands of loosened hair
into the lowest vessel,
so streams the fullness into you,
when things and thoughts cannot contain it.
-- from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, by Rainer Maria Rilke / Translated by Joanna Macy
-
Hes so amazing. What a way with words. :)