The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (15 page)

There: the shriveled-up, wrinkled weight-lifter,

an old man who only drums now,

shrunk in his enormous skin, which looks as if it had once

contained
two
men, and the other

were already lying in the graveyard, while this one lived on without him,

deaf and sometimes a little

confused, in the widowed skin.

And the young one over there, the man, who might be the son of a neck

and a nun: firm and vigorously filled

with muscles and innocence.

Children,

whom a grief that was still quite small

once received as a toy, during one of its

long convalescences.…

You, little boy, who fall down

a hundred times daily, with the thud

that only unripe fruits know, from the tree of mutually

constructed motion (which more quickly than water, in a few

minutes, has its spring, summer, and autumn)—

fall down hard on the grave:

sometimes, during brief pauses, a loving look

toward your seldom affectionate mother tries to be born

in your expression; but it gets lost along the way,

your body consumes it, that timid

scarcely-attempted face … And again

the man is clapping his hands for your leap, and before

a pain can become more distinct near your constantly racing

heart, the stinging in your soles rushes ahead of

that other pain, chasing a pair

of physical tears quickly into your eyes.

And nevertheless, blindly,

the smile ……

Oh gather it, Angel, that small-flowered herb of healing.

Create a vase and preserve it. Set it among those joys

not
yet
open to us; on that lovely urn

praise it with the ornately flowing inscription:

                                        “Subrisio Saltat.”

    And you then, my lovely darling,

you whom the most tempting joys

have mutely leapt over. Perhaps

your fringes are happy
for
you—,

or perhaps the green

metallic silk stretched over your firm young breasts

feels itself endlessly indulged and in need of nothing.

You

display-fruit of equanimity,

set out in front of the public, in continual variations

on all the swaying scales of equipoise,

lifted among the shoulders.

Oh
where
is the place—I carry it in my heart—,

where they still were far from mastery, still fell apart

from each other, like mating cattle that someone

has badly paired;—

where the weights are still heavy; where

from their vainly twirling sticks

the plates still wobble

and drop ……

And suddenly in this laborious nowhere, suddenly

the unsayable spot where the pure Too-little is transformed

incomprehensibly—, leaps around and changes

into that empty Too-much;

where the difficult calculation

becomes numberless and resolved.

Squares, oh square in Paris, infinite showplace

where the milliner Madame Lamort

twists and winds the restless paths of the earth,

those endless ribbons, and, from them, designs

new bows, frills, flowers, ruffles, artificial fruits—, all

falsely colored,—for the cheap

winter bonnets of Fate.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Angel!: If there were a place that we didn’t know of, and there,

on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed

what they never could bring to mastery here—the bold

exploits of their high-flying hearts,

their towers of pleasure, their ladders

that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning

just on each other, trembling,—and could
master
all this,

before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:

    Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,

forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid

coins of happiness before the at last

genuinely smiling pair on the gratified

carpet?

Fig-tree, for such a long time I have found meaning

in the way you almost completely omit your blossoms

and urge your pure mystery, unproclaimed,

into the early ripening fruit.

Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs drive the sap

downward and up again: and almost without awakening

it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement.

Like the god stepping into the swan.

                         …… But
we
still linger, alas,

we, whose pride is in blossoming; we enter the overdue

interior of our final fruit and are already betrayed.

In only a few does the urge to action rise up

so powerfully that they stop, glowing in their heart’s abundance,

while, like the soft night air, the temptation to blossom

touches their tender mouths, touches their eyelids, softly:

heroes perhaps, and those chosen to disappear early,

whose veins Death the gardener twists into a different pattern.

These plunge on ahead: in advance of their own smile

like the team of galloping horses before the triumphant

pharaoh in the mildly hollowed reliefs at Karnak.

The hero is strangely close to those who died young. Permanence

does not concern him. He lives in continual ascent,

moving on into the ever-changed constellation

of perpetual danger. Few could find him there. But

Fate, which is silent about us, suddenly grows inspired

and sings him into the storm of his onrushing world.

I hear no one like
him.
All at once I am pierced

by his darkened voice, carried on the streaming air.

Then how gladly I would hide from the longing to be once again

oh a boy once again, with my life before me, to sit

leaning on future arms and reading of Samson,

how from his mother first nothing, then everything, was born.

Wasn’t he a hero inside you, mother? didn’t

his imperious choosing already begin there, in you?

Thousands seethed in your womb, wanting to be
him
,

but look: he grasped and excluded—, chose and prevailed.

And if he demolished pillars, it was when he burst

from the world of your body into the narrower world, where again

he chose and prevailed. O mothers of heroes, O sources

of ravaging floods! You ravines into which

virgins have plunged, lamenting,

from the highest rim of the heart, sacrifices to the son.

    For whenever the hero stormed through the stations of love,

each heartbeat intended for him lifted him up, beyond it;

and, turning away, he stood there, at the end of all smiles,—transfigured.

Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,

be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird

when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting

that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart

being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies. Just like him

you would be wooing, not any less purely—, so that, still

unseen, she would sense you, the silent lover in whom a reply

slowly awakens and, as she hears you, grows warm,—

the ardent companion to your own most daring emotion.

Oh and springtime would hold it—, everywhere it would echo

the song of annunciation. First the small

questioning notes intensified all around

by the sheltering silence of a pure, affirmative day.

Then up the stairs, up the stairway of calls, to the dreamed-of

temple of the future—; and then the trill, like a fountain

which, in its rising jet, already anticipates its fall

in a game of promises.… And still ahead: summer.

    Not only all the dawns of summer—, not only

how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning.

Not only the days, so tender around flowers and, above,

around the patterned treetops, so strong, so intense.

Not only the reverence of all these unfolded powers,

not only the pathways, not only the meadows at sunset,

not only, after a late storm, the deep-breathing freshness,

not only approaching sleep, and a premonition …

but also the nights! But also the lofty summer

nights, and the stars as well, the stars of the earth.

Oh to be dead at last and know them endlessly,

all the stars: for how, how could we ever forget them!

Look, I was calling for my lover. But not just
she

would come … Out of their fragile graves

girls would arise and gather … For how could I limit

the call, once I called it? These unripe spirits keep seeking

the earth.—Children, one earthly Thing

truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.

Don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood;

how often you outdistanced the man you loved, breathing, breathing

after the blissful chase, and passed on into freedom.

Truly
being here is glorious. Even
you
knew it,

you girls who seemed to be lost, to go under—, in the filthiest

streets of the city, festering there, or wide open

for garbage. For each of you had an hour, or perhaps

not even an hour, a barely measurable time

between two moments—, when you were granted a sense

of being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.

But we can so easily forget what our laughing neighbor

neither confirms nor envies. We want to display it,

to make it visible, though even the most visible happiness

can’t reveal itself to us until we transform it, within.

Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life

passes in transformation. And the external

shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was,

now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely

belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain.

Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,

formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.

Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up

these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives,

a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—

just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.

Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance

to build it
inside
themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.

Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited ones,

to whom neither the past belongs, nor yet what has nearly arrived.

For even the nearest moment is far from mankind. Though
we

should not be confused by this, but strengthened in our task of preserving

the still-recognizable form.— This once
stood
among mankind,

in the midst of Fate the annihilator, in the midst

of Not-Knowing-Whither, it stood as if enduring, and bent

stars down to it from their safeguarded heavens. Angel,

to
you
I will show it,
there!
in your endless vision

it shall stand, now finally upright, rescued at last.

Pillars, pylons, the Sphinx, the striving thrust

of the cathedral, gray, from a fading or alien city.

Wasn’t all this a miracle? Be astonished, Angel, for we

are
this, O Great One; proclaim that we could achieve this, my breath

is too short for such praise. So, after all, we have not

failed to make use of these generous spaces, these

spaces of
ours.
(How frighteningly great they must be,

since thousands of years have not made them overflow with our feelings.)

But a tower was great, wasn’t it? Oh Angel, it was—

even when placed beside you? Chartres was great—, and music

reached still higher and passed far beyond us. But even

a woman in love—, oh alone at night by her window.…

didn’t she reach your knee—?

                         Don’t think that I’m wooing.

Angel, and even if I were, you would not come. For my call

is always filled with departure; against such a powerful

current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm

is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up

to seize, remains in front of you, open

as if in defense and warning,

Ungraspable One, far above.

Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner

With all its eyes the natural world looks out

into the Open. Only
our
eyes are turned

backward, and surround plant, animal, child

like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from

the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young

child and force it around, so that it sees

objects—not the Open, which is so

deep in animals’ faces. Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal

has its decline in back of it, forever,

and God in front, and when it moves, it moves

already in eternity, like a fountain.

    Never, not for a single day, do
we
have

before us that pure space into which flowers

endlessly open. Always there is World

and never Nowhere without the No: that pure

unseparated element which one breathes

without desire and endlessly
knows.
A child

may wander there for hours, through the timeless

stillness, may get lost in it and be

shaken back. Or someone dies and
is
it.

For, nearing death, one doesn’t see death; but stares

beyond, perhaps with an animal’s vast gaze.

Lovers, if the beloved were not there

blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel …

As if by some mistake, it opens for them

behind each other … But neither can move past

the other, and it changes back to World.

Forever turned toward objects, we see in them

the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,

which we have dimmed. Or when some animal

mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.

That is what fate means: to be opposite,

to be opposite and nothing else, forever.