The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (16 page)

If the animal moving toward us so securely

in a different direction had our kind of

consciousness—, it would wrench us around and drag us

along its path. But it feels its life as boundless,

unfathomable, and without regard

to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.

And where we see the future, it sees all time

and itself within all time, forever healed.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies

the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.

For it too feels the presence of what often

overwhelms us: a memory, as if

the element we keep pressing toward was once

more intimate, more true, and our communion

infinitely tender. Here all is distance;

there it was breath. After that first home,

the second seems ambiguous and drafty.

    Oh bliss of the
tiny
creature which remains

forever inside the womb that was its shelter;

joy of the gnat which, still
within
, leaps up

even at its marriage: for everything is womb.

And look at the half-assurance of the bird,

which knows both inner and outer, from its source,

as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,

flown out of a dead man received inside a space,

but with his reclining image as the lid.

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature

that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing

from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way

a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat

quivers across the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Who has twisted us around like this, so that

no matter what we do, we are in the posture

of someone going away? Just as, upon

the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley

one last time, he turns, stops, lingers—,

so we live here, forever taking leave.

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then

have to be human—and, escaping from fate,

keep longing for fate? …

                                        Oh
not
because happiness
exists
,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

would exist in the laurel too.…

But because
truly
being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once
for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it.—Whom can we give it to? We would

hold on to it all, forever … Ah, but what can we take along

into that other realm? Not the art of looking,

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,

and the long experience of love,— just what is wholly

unsayable. But later, among the stars,

what good is it—
they
are
better
as they are: unsayable.

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue

gentian. Perhaps we are
here
in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—

at most: column, tower.… But to
say
them, you must understand,

oh to say them
more
intensely than the Things themselves

ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent

of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,

that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?

Threshold: what it means for two lovers

to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door—

they too, after the many who came before them

and before those to come.…, lightly.

Here
is the time for the
sayable, here
is its homeland.

Speak and bear witness. More than ever

the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for

what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.

An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as

the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.

Between the hammers our heart

endures, just as the tongue does

between the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise.

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,

you can’t impress
him
with glorious emotion; in the universe

where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him

something simple which, formed over generations,

lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.

Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as
you
stood

by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.

Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,

how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,

serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing—, and blissfully

escapes far beyond the violin.—And these Things,

which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,

they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,

within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,

invisible
? Isn’t it your dream

to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!

What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer

need your springtimes to win me over—one of them,

ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.

Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.

You were always right, and your holiest inspiration

is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future

grows any smaller ….. Superabundant being

wells up in my heart.

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,

let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.

Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart

fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,

or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face

make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise

and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights

of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,

inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end. Though they are really

our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,

one
season in our inner year—, not only a season

in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

But how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief,

where, in the false silence formed of continual uproar,

the figure cast from the mold of emptiness stoutly

swaggers: the gilded noise, the bursting memorial.

Oh how completely an angel would stamp out their market of solace,

bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations:

clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday.

Farther out, though, the city’s edges are curling with carnival.

Swings of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!

And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,

which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance

he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions

are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only

there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,

right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,

the whole action—, educational, and guaranteed

to increase your potency ………

…… Oh, but a little farther,

beyond the last of the billboards, plastered with signs for “Deathless,”

that bitter beer which seems so sweet to its drinkers

as long as they chew fresh distractions in between sips …,

just in back of the billboard, just behind, the view becomes
real.

Children are playing, and lovers are holding hands, to the side,

solemnly in the meager grass, and dogs are doing what is natural.

The young man is drawn on, farther; perhaps he is in love with a young

Lament …… He comes out behind her, into the meadows. She says:

—It’s a long walk. We live way out there.…

                                        Where? And the youth

follows. He is touched by her manner. Her shoulders, her neck—, perhaps

she is of noble descent. But he leaves her, turns around,

looks back, waves … What’s the use? She is a Lament.

Only those who died young, in their first condition

of timeless equanimity, while they are being weaned,

follow her lovingly. She waits

for girls and befriends them. Shows them, gently,

what she is wearing. Pearls of grief and the fine-spun

veils of patience.—With young men she walks

in silence.

But there, in the valley, where they live, one of the elder Laments

answers the youth when he questions her:—Long ago,

she says, we Laments were a powerful race. Our forefathers worked

the mines, up there in the mountain-range; sometimes even

among men you can find a polished nugget of primal grief

or a chunk of petrified rage from the slag of an ancient volcano.

Yes, that came from up there. We used to be rich.—

And gently she guides him through the vast landscape of Lament,

shows him the pillars of the temples, and the ruined walls

of those castles from which, long ago, the princes of Lament

wisely ruled the land. Shows him the tall

trees of tears and the fields of blossoming grief

(the living know it just as a mild green shrub);

shows him the herds of sorrow, grazing,—and sometimes

a startled bird, flying low through their upward gaze,

far away traces the image of its solitary cry.—

In the twilight she leads him out to the graves of the elders

who gave warning to the race of Laments, the sibyls and prophets.

But as night approaches, they move more softly, and soon

the sepulchre rises up

like a moon, watching over everything. Brother to the one on the Nile,

the lofty Sphinx—: the taciturn chamber’s

countenance.

And they look in wonder at the regal head that has silently

lifted the human face

to the scale of the stars, forever.

Still dizzy from recent death, his sight

cannot grasp it. But her gaze

frightens an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And the bird,

with slow downstrokes, brushes along the cheek,

the one with the fuller curve,

and faintly, in the dead youth’s new

sense of hearing, as upon a double

unfolded page, it sketches the indescribable outline.

And higher, the stars. The new stars of the land of grief.

Slowly the Lament names them:—Look, there:

the
Rider
, the
Staff
, and the larger constellation

called
Garland of Fruit.
Then, farther up toward the Pole:

Cradle; Path; The Burning Book; Puppet; Window.

But there, in the southern sky, pure as the lines

on the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling
M

that stands for Mothers …… —

But the dead youth must go on by himself, and silently the elder Lament

takes him as far as the ravine,

where shimmering in the moonlight

is the fountainhead of joy. With reverence

she names it and says: —Among men

it is a mighty stream.—

They stand at the foot of the mountain-range.

And she embraces him, weeping.

Alone, he climbs on, up the mountains of primal grief.

And not once do his footsteps echo from the soundless path.

But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,

perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare

branches of the hazel-trees, or

would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.—

And we, who have always thought

of happiness as
rising
, would feel

the emotion that almost overwhelms us

whenever a happy thing
falls.