Reading Rilke (28 page)

For each of you had an hour, perhaps a bit less,

at worst a scarcely measurable span between while and while,

when you wholly
were
. Had all. Were bursting with Being.

But we easily forget what our laughing neighbor

neither confirms nor envies. We want to show it off,

yet the most apparent joy reveals itself only after

it has been transformed, when it rises
within
us.

My love, the world exists nowhere but within us.

Withinwarding is everything. The outer world

dwindles, and day fades from day. Where once

a solid house was, soon some invented structure

perversely suggests itself, as at ease among ideas

as if it still stood in the brain.

The Present has amassed vast stores of power,

shapeless as the vibrant energy it has stolen from the earth.

It has forgotten temples. We must save in secret

such lavish expenditures of spirit.

Yes, even where one thing we served, knelt for, and

prayed to survives, it seeks to see itself invisible.

Many have ceased perceiving it, and so will miss

the chance to enlarge it, add pillars and statues, give it grandeur, within.

Each torpid turn of the world disinherits some

to whom neither what’s been nor will be adheres.

For to humans even what comes next is far away.

We
, however, should not be confused by this,

but should resolve to retain the shape in stone we still recognize.

This once stood like a standard among mankind,

stood facing fate, the destroyer, stood in the middle

of our not knowing what, why, or wherefore, as though an answer existed,

and took its design from the stars’ firm place in heaven.

Angel, to you I shall show it—there! in your eyes

it shall stand seen and redeemed at last, straight

as pillars, pylons, the sphinx, the cathedral’s

gray spire thrust up from a decaying or a foreign city.

Wasn’t it miraculous? O marvel, Angel, that we
did it
,

we, O great one, extol our achievements,

my breath is too short for such praise.

Because, after all, we haven’t failed to make use

of our sphere
—ours
—these generous spaces.

(How frightfully vast they must be,

not to have overflowed with our feelings

even after these thousands of years.)

But one tower was great, wasn’t it? O Angel, it was—

even compared to you? Chartres was great—

and music rose even higher, flew far beyond us.

Even a woman in love, alone at night by her window …

didn’t she reach your knee?

    Don’t think I’m courting you, Angel.

And even if I were! You’d never come.

For my call is always full of “stay away.”

Against such a powerful current even you cannot advance.

My call is like an outstretched arm. And its upturned,

open, available hand is always in front of you,

yet only to ward off and warn,

though wide open, incomprehensible.
⁷

THE EIGHTH ELEGY

Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner

All other creatures look into the Open

with their whole eyes. Our eyes, instead, go round the other way,

setting snares and traps on every path to freedom.

What
is
outside, we read solely from the animal’s gaze,

for we compel even the young child to turn and look back at preconceived things,

never to know the acceptance so deeply set inside

the animal’s face. Free from death.

It
is all we see. The free animal

always has its decline behind, its god ahead,

and when it moves, it moves within eternity the way fountains flow.

We’ve never had that sort of pure space before us,

into which flowers endlessly open—no, not for a single day—

there’s always the interpreted world, and even our

abstract realms reflect a repeated yes or no:

never that pure unmonitored element one breathes,

naturally knows, and never craves. As a child

one may be absorbed by silence only to be shaken

out of it again. Or one dies and
is
it.

Too close to death, one may see it no longer,

to stare ahead instead, maybe with the wide eyes of animals.

Lovers approach it, and would be amazed,

were not a partner always in the way …

It opens up behind the other almost by mistake …

but no one gets beyond the other, and the world comes back again.

Continuously confronted by creation, we see there

only a dimmed reflection of the free and open.

Or some dumb animal, with its calm eyes,

is seeing through and through us.

That’s our Fate, to be possessed by the opposite,

to see an inversion and nothing more.

If this confident creature coming toward us,

on such a different course, had our kind of consciousness,

he would spin us around and drag us in his wake.

But to him he is infinite, incomprehensible,

and because he is blind to his condition,

his outward gaze is pure. Where we see

the future, he sees all, and sees himself in everything,

he and all, whole always.

And yet upon the warm and watchful animal

there lies the weight and care of an immense sadness.

Because what often overwhelms us clings to him, too:

the remembrance that what we reach for now,

we were once tenderly tethered to. Here all is

disparity and distance, there it was heartbeat and breath.

After the first home, our second seems uncertain and cold.

Oh, the bliss of those so small they can remain in the place where they came to be;

Oh, the pleasure the midge must know, who will dance

even its wedding dance in the same world in which it was conceived.

Observe the less certain bird, from birth

almost aware of both, like one of those Etruscan

souls who has flown the corpse which was its nest,

yet where its hovering figure still forms the coffin’s lid.

How confused the bat must be: to come from a womb,

yet be called upon to fly. As if in flight from itself,

it zigzags through the air like a crack through a cup.

In the same way its wing, at dusk, crazes the porcelain surface of the sky.

And we: spectators always, everywhere,

looking on, but never beyond!

World overwhelms us. We order it. The order falls.

We rearrange it and come apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this,

so that whatever we do, we wear the look of someone departing?

As he who halts, one final time,

on a hill high enough

to show off his whole valley,

wavers and stops and lingers there,

we too live our lives forever taking leave.
⁸

THE NINTH ELEGY

Why, if the seasons of life could be passed

as a laurel, a little darker than all other green,

with tiny waves on the edge of each leaf,

like the smile of a wind—: why, then,

must we be human—and, shunning our Destiny,

long for Fate?…

            Oh, not because happiness—

that profit snatched hastily from threatening loss—

exists
: not from curiosity, not simply to practice

a heart that could live quite as well in a laurel …

but because it is much just to be here,

because all that is fleeting here needs us,

strangely concerns us. Us, most fleeting of all.

Just
once
. Everything. Only
once. Once
and no more.

And we as well:
once
. Then never again. But this

having
been
once, although
only
once,

having been earthed—can it ever be canceled?

And so we push ourselves on and pray to achieve it,

to hold it in our simple hands,

in our ever more crowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Pray to become it. To give it to someone? We’d rather

keep it a keepsake forever … But to that other land,

alas, what can be taken? Not our power of perceiving,

learned here so slowly; nothing here that’s happened.

Nothing. But possibly suffering. Above all, the hardness of life,

and the long endurance of love—wholly

untellable things. But later, when the stars have us under them,

what then is the use? The stars are still better unspoken.

Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earth

from his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute),

but a word he has plucked from the climbing: the yellow and blue

gentian. Are we, perhaps,
here
just to utter: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window—

at most: column, tower … but to
utter
them, remember,

to speak in a way which the named never dreamed

they could
be
? Isn’t it the hidden purpose

of this cunning earth, in urging on lovers,

to realize, through their rapture, rapture for all?

Threshold: what it can mean for two lovers

to foot down their threshold a little,

just as the many who’ve come through have worn it,

and ahead of the many to follow … so lightly.

Here
is the time for words,
here
is its home.

Speak and proclaim. More than ever,

the things we can live with are falling away,

and imageless action’s usurping their place.

Real acts will quickly crack their shells

when what’s working within them

brings forth a new form.

Our heart dwells between hammers,

like the tongue between the teeth,

where it remains, notwithstanding,

a continual creator of praise.

Praise this world to the Angel, not the unutterable one.

You cannot impress
him
with the splendor you’ve felt,

for in the heaven of heavens, where he feels so sublimely,

you’re but a beginner. Show him some simple thing, then,

that’s been changed in its passage through human ages

till it lives in our hands, in the shine of our eyes, as a part

of ourselves. Tell him
things
. He’ll stand more astonished,

as you stood by the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.

Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;