[For the sake of a single poem]

"...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else --); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and dificult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, -- and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories, You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves -- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

From the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

-- Rainer Maria Rilke 

Turning-Point

The road from intensity to greatness 

    passes through sacrifice. --Kassner


For a long time he attained it in looking.

Stars would fall to their knees

beneath his compelling vision.

Or as he looked on, kneeling,

his urgency's fragrance

tired out a god until

it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so

that they were terrified:

building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!

But how often the landscape,

overburdened by day,

came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped

into his open look, grazing,

and the imprisoned lions

stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;

birds, as it felt them, flew headlong

through it; and flowers, as enormous

as they are to children, gazed back

into it, on and on.

And the rumor that there was someone

who knew how to look,

stirred those less

visible creatures;

stirred the women.

Looking how long?

For how long now, deeply deprived,

beseechng in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Wiating, sat far from home --

the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom

moody around him, and in the avoided mirror

once more the room, and later

from the tormenting bed

once more:

then in the air the voices

discussed, beyond comprehension,

his heart, which could still be felt;

debated what through the painfully buried body

could somehow be felt -- his heart;

debated and passed their judgement:

that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking.

And the world that is looked at so deeply

wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now

go and do heart-work

on all the images imprisoned within you; for you

overpowered them; but even now you don't know them.

Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,

the one attained from a thousand

natures, the merely attained but

not yet beloved form.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Swan

This laboring through what is still undone,
as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,

is like the awkward walking of the swan.

And dying -- to let go, no longer feel

the solid ground we stand on every day --

is like his anxious letting himself fall

into the water, which receives him gently

and which, as though with reverence and joy,

draws back past him in streams on either side;

while, infinitely silent and aware,

in his full majesty and ever more

indifferent, he condescends to glide.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Flamingos

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

With all the subtle paints of Fragonard

no more of their red and white could be expressed

then someone would convey about his mistresss

by telling you, "She was lovely, lying there

still soft with sleep." They rise above the green

grass and lightly sway on their long pink stems,

side by side, like enormous feathery blossoms,

seducing (more seductivelt than Phryne)

themsleves; till, necks curling, they sink their large 

pale eyes into the softness of their down,

where apple-red and jet-black lie concealed.

A shriek of envy shakes the parrot cage;

but they stretch out, astonished, and one by one

stride into their imaginary world.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,

almost self-enclosed and growing sweet --

all this universe, to the furthest stars

and 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.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Love Song

How shall I keep my soul

from touching yours? How shall I

lift it out beyond you toward other things?

Ah, I would like to lodge it

in the dark with some lost thing

in some silent foreign place

that doesn't tremble when your depths stir.

Yes whatever touches you and me

blends us together just as a bow's stroke

from two strings draws one voice.

Across what instrument are we stretched taut?

And what player holds us in his hand?

O sweet song.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,

The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,

The yellow moon of words about the nightingale

In measureless measures, not a bird for me

But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air

I have never -- shall never hear. And yet beneath

The stillness of everything gone, and being still,

Being and sitting still, something resides,

Some skreaking and skrittering residuum

And grates these evasions of the nightingale

Though I have never -- shall never hear that bird.

And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,

The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

-- Wallace Stevens