Four Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated from German by Daniel Tobin

DOOR

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Whoever you are, whoever you are,

in evening’s cusp step outside the room

of all you know, of all you are aware.

Of the near-to-what’s-far, yours is the last home.

With eyes that can barely pry themselves

from the wasted threshold, you lift one

black tree slowly into difficult

place against the sky: slender, alone.

And so, create the world. And it’s immense,

and like a word that ripens inside silence,

and like intention quickening into sense,

your eyes slowly tender its release…

ELEGY

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O the endlessly fleeting stars—all the losses, Marina,

into the All!  We cannot increase any of it, wherever

it is we might heave ourselves, to whatever distant star!

In the All-in-All, always everything’s already redeemed.

Nor does each fall lessen the sacred figure. Each fall

is a relinquishment into the Source, and a healing.

Is this all game, a gambit, a swap of same into same,

nowhere a name, and nowhere, hardly, any resident worth?

Swells, Marina, we are ocean. Abysses, Marina, we’re sky.

Earth, we are Earth, Marina, we are a thousandfold spring,

like larks borne onward to Invisibility in a burst of song.

We begin the song rejoicing—already it surpasses us wildly;

but suddenly our heaviness bends it downward to lament.

But why, “lament”? Why not “infant-joy-in-decrescendo”?

Even the lesser of the gods want to be glorified, Marina.

Gods are so guileless; they hang on praise like school kids.

Praise, my dear, we must be extravagant in giving praise.

Nothing belongs to us. We gently place our hand around

the necks of un-plucked flowers. I saw it on the Nile,

in Kom-Ombo. This way, a king’s gift makes self-denial

a sacrifice. Just as angels walk, marking doors of those

to be saved, so we touch this and that, as if it were we

who are the tender ones. Ah, well, how absent we are

already, absent-minded, even in the most ardent guise.

Token-givers, nothing more. This intricate business

where one of us can no longer bear the cost, and steels

himself for the seizing, to get his own back, and kills.

For as we surmised by its willingness to pass over,

and its leniency, the deadly has power, and the stranger

power, to change us from living to the ones living on.

Not-Being. Do you remember how often a blind charge

sustained us through the icy waiting room of new birth…

Sustained us? Sustained a body of eyes, shut, numbed,

under their numberless lids. Sustained in each of us

the prostrate heart of the whole species. Sustained all,

all of us, on the soaring of a migratory bird, the image

of our transfiguration. Lovers, Marina, should not know

anything of the depths of ruin. They must be made new.

Only their grave is old, only their grave reflects, darkening

under a sobbing tree, reflects on everything that ever was.

Only their grave disintegrates; they themselves are lithe

as reeds; what nearly breaks them richly loops them

into a wreath. How they blow everywhere in the May wind.

(From the midst of Always in which you breathe and guess,

each instant stays them. O how I grasped what you meant,

feminine blossom on the same imperishable bush. How

urgently I scatter myself into the night air that will just

barely touch you with the next and next.) The gods

early on learned to dissemble into halves. We, drawn

into the circuit of each other, flourished into a whole

like the roundness of the moon. Even in the waning,

even in the weeks of return, no one could ever help us

to reach this fullness once again—there now is only

our own solitary passage across the sleepless landscape.