Topic: Rainer Maria Rilke

[Firestarter]

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.

[Firestarter]

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.

[Firestarter]

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?

[Firestarter]

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.

[Firestarter]

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.

[Firestarter]

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.
 
 

[Firestarter]

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. 
 

[Firestarter]

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.

[Firestarter]

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.

[Nichi]

Abishag

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJcHEwdS6PU&feature=sub

[Firestarter]

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.

[Nichi]

Oh that's good.

[Nichi]

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

[Michael]

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

[Nichi]

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