The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (14 page)

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. For 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.

It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas,

to invoke that hidden, guilty river-god of the blood.

Her young lover, whom she knows from far away—what does he know of

the lord of desire who often, up from the depths of his solitude,

even before she could soothe him, and as though she didn’t exist,

held up his head, ah, dripping with the unknown,

erect, and summoned the night to an endless uproar.

Oh the Neptune inside our blood, with his appalling trident.

Oh the dark wind from his breast out of that spiraled conch.

Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow. O stars,

isn’t it from you that the lover’s desire for the face

of his beloved arises? Doesn’t his secret insight

into her pure features come from the pure constellations?

Not you, his mother: alas, you were not the one

who bent the arch of his eyebrows into such expectation.

Not for you, girl so aware of him, not for your mouth

did his lips curve themselves into a more fruitful expression.

Do you really think that your gentle steps could have shaken him

with such violence, you who move like the morning breeze?

Yes, you did frighten his heart; but more ancient terrors

plunged into him at the shock of that feeling. Call him …

but you can’t quite call him away from those dark companions.

Of course, he
wants
to escape, and he does; relieved, he nestles

into your sheltering heart, takes hold, and begins himself.

But did he ever begin himself, really?

Mother,
you
made him small, it was you who started him;

in
your
sight he was new, over his new eyes you arched

the friendly world and warded off the world that was alien.

Ah, where are the years when you shielded him just by placing

your slender form between him and the surging abyss?

How much you hid from him then. The room that filled with suspicion

at night: you made it harmless; and out of the refuge of your heart

you mixed a more human space in with his night-space.

And you set down the lamp, not in that darkness, but in

your own nearer presence, and it glowed at him like a friend.

There wasn’t a creak that your smile could not explain,

as though you had long known just when the floor would do that …

And he listened and was soothed. So powerful was your presence

as you tenderly stood by the bed; his fate,

tall and cloaked, retreated behind the wardrobe, and his restless

future, delayed for a while, adapted to the folds of the curtain.

And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, with the sweetness

of the gentle world you had made for him dissolving beneath

his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of sleep—:

he
seemed
protected … But inside: who could ward off,

who could divert, the floods of origin inside him?

Ah, there
was
no trace of caution in that sleeper; sleeping,

yes but dreaming, but flushed with what fevers: how he threw himself in.

All at once new, trembling, how he was caught up

and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event

already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling

bestial shapes. How he submitted—. Loved.

Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,

that primal forest inside him, where among decayed treetrunks

his heart stood, light-green. Loved. Left it, went through

his own roots and out, into the powerful source

where his little birth had already been outlived. Loving,

he waded down into more ancient blood, to ravines

where Horror lay, still glutted with his fathers. And every

Terror knew him, winked at him like an accomplice.

Yes, Atrocity smiled … Seldom

had you smiled so tenderly, mother. How could he help

loving what smiled at him. Even before he knew you,

he had loved it, for already while you carried him inside you, it

was dissolved in the water that makes the embryo weightless.

No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year

as the flowers do; an immemorial sap

flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl,

this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but

seething multitudes; not just a single child,

but also the fathers lying in our depths

like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds

of ancient mothers—; also the whole

soundless landscape under the clouded or clear

sky of its destiny—: all this, my dear, preceded you.

And you yourself, how could you know

what primordial time you stirred in your lover. What passions

welled up inside him from departed beings. What

women hated you there. How many dark

sinister men you aroused in his young veins. Dead

children reached out to touch you … Oh gently, gently,

let him see you performing, with love, some confident daily task,—

lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs

the heaviest night ……

                         Restrain him ……

O trees of life, when does your winter come?

We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us

like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken,

we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind

and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.

Flowering and fading come to us both at once.

And somewhere lions still roam and never know,

in their majestic power, of any weakness.

But we, while we are intent upon one object,

already feel the pull of another. Conflict

is second nature to us. Aren’t lovers

always arriving at each other’s boundaries?—

although they promised vastness, hunting, home.

    As when for some quick sketch, a wide background

of contrast is laboriously prepared

so that we can see more clearly: we never know

the actual, vital contour of our own

emotions—just what forms them from outside.

    Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s

curtain? It rose: the scenery of farewell.

Easy to recognize. The well-known garden,

which swayed a little. Then the dancer came.

Not
him.
Enough! However lightly he moves,

he’s costumed, made up—an ordinary man

who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen.

    I won’t endure these half-filled human masks;

better, the puppet. It at least is full.

I’ll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face

that is nothing but appearance. Here. I’m waiting.

Even if the lights go out; even if someone

tells me “That’s all”; even if emptiness

floats toward me in a gray draft from the stage;

even if not one of my silent ancestors

stays seated with me, not one woman, not

the boy with the immovable brown eye—

I’ll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

Am I not right? You, to whom life tasted

so bitter after you took a sip of mine,

the first, gritty infusion of my will,

Father—who, as I grew up, kept on tasting

and, troubled by the aftertaste of so

strange a future, searched my unfocused gaze—

you who, so often since you died, have trembled

for my well-being, within my deepest hope,

relinquishing that calmness which the dead

feel as their very essence, countless realms

of equanimity, for my scrap of life—

tell me, am I not right? And you, dear women

who must have loved me for my small beginning

of love toward you, which I always turned away from

because the space in your features grew, changed,

even while I loved it, into cosmic space,

where you no longer were—: am I not right

to feel as if I
must
stay seated, must

wait before the puppet stage, or, rather,

gaze at it so intensely that at last,

to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and

make the stuffed skins startle into life.

Angel and puppet: a real play, finally.

Then what we separate by our very presence

can come together. And only then, the whole

cycle of transformation will arise,

out of our own life-seasons. Above, beyond us,

the angel plays. If no one else, the dying

must notice how unreal, how full of pretense,

is all that we accomplish here, where nothing

is allowed to be itself. Oh hours of childhood,

when behind each shape more than the past appeared

and what streamed out before us was not the future.

We felt our bodies growing and were at times

impatient to
be
grown up, half for the sake

of those with nothing left but their grownupness.

Yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted

with what alone endures; and we would stand there

in the infinite, blissful space between world and toy,

at a point which, from the earliest beginning,

had been established for a pure event.

Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him

in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod

of distance in his hand? Who makes his death

out of gray bread, which hardens—or leaves it there

inside his round mouth, jagged as the core

of a sweet apple? …… Murderers are easy

to understand. But this: that one can contain

death, the whole of death, even before

life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart

gently, and not refuse to go on living,

is inexpressible.

Dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig

But tell me, who
are
they, these wanderers, even more

transient than we ourselves, who from their earliest days

are savagely wrung out

by a never-satisfied will (for
whose
sake)? Yet it wrings them,

bends them, twists them, swings them and flings them

and catches them again; and falling as if through oiled

slippery air, they land

on the threadbare carpet, worn constantly thinner

by their perpetual leaping, this carpet that is lost

in infinite space.

Stuck on like a bandage, as if the suburban sky

had wounded the earth.

                         And hardly has it appeared

when, standing there, upright, is: the large capital D

that begins Duration … , and the always-approaching grip

takes them again, as a joke, even the strongest

men, and crushes them, the way King Augustus the Strong

would crush a pewter plate.

Ah and around this

center: the rose of Onlooking

blooms and unblossoms. Around this

pestle pounding the carpet,

this pistil, fertilized by the pollen

of its own dust, and producing in turn

the specious fruit of displeasure: the unconscious

gaping faces, their thin

surfaces glossy with boredom’s specious half-smile.