by their incessant leaping and landing,
a carpet lost in cosmic space.
Stuck there like a bandage, as if the suburban sky
had bruised the earth.
And barely there,
upright, displayed there, the great first letter of
Da … for in Fate’s repeated and relentless grip
even the strongest men are tossed, in whim,
from their station again, the way Augustus the Strong
toyed with the tin platter that served his table.
Ah, and around this center,
attention like a rose
blooms and sheds its petals. About this
pestle-like pistil, its surface shining with sham and smirk;
impregnated by its own pollen
so it bears boredom’s seedless fruit.
There’s the weary and wrinkled weight lifter,
able only, so old, to beat a drum,
shrunk in his scrotum-like skin
as if it had once held two men,
though now one’s dead in the ground
while he lives on, deaf and dazed
in his widower’s weeds.
Then the young one, the man, who might be
the son of a neck and a nun,
tense and tightly filled
with muscle and simplicity.
Oh, and you, to be the plaything of some pain,
while it was still little, a gift
during one of its long convalescences …
You, who fall with the thud
only green fruit know,
like daily rain from the tall boughs
the movements of your troupe create
(a tree which passes through its seasons
more rapidly than water, spring to fall),
only to land where your grave will be.
Sometimes, in a momentary pause, you
feel a shy look of love, for one seldom allowed to be your mother,
begin to flood your face, though it will soon be
absorbed by the business of your body.
Again, the man’s clapping hands are calling for more leaping,
but before an honest anguish can catch up
with your racing heart—
the true source of painful feeling—
comes the sting in the soles of your feet,
to force its few tears from your eyes.
Yet there’s that blind smile.
Angel! Oh, take that smile! pluck that little flowered herb of healing,
find a vase to save it! Include it among those joys
not yet open to us. In a graceful urn
let an ornate inscription praise it: “Subrisio Saltat.”
You, then, lovely one,
you, over whom the most enchanting pleasures
have skipped without a sound,
maybe your fringes are happy for you,
or the green metallic silk
that binds your firm full breasts
feels itself so soothed it needs nothing further.
You,
lifted upon shoulders to be shown,
and balanced and rebalanced on swaying scales,
calmly, like a marketed fruit.
Where, oh, where, is that place—I bear in my heart—
so long a way from hard-earned mastery,
where they fell away from one another like mating animals,
weary, ill-matched,
where weights were too heavy,
where their spinning plates
still toppled from the tips of their futilely stirring sticks …?
Suddenly, in this tiresome no-man’s-land, suddenly,
in this indescribable place, the always “not good enough”
is magically transformed—turns back to start,
and into a sterile perfection
where the long-columned bill
adds up and adds up … adds up to nil.
Squares, O square in Paris, ceaseless showplace,
where the modiste Madame Lamort
weaves and winds the restless ways of the world,
those endless ribbons, into ever new designs:
bows, frills, flowers, cockades, artificial fruit,
each cheaply dyed, to decorate
the tacky winter hats of Fate.
Angel: if there were a place we knew nothing of,
and there, on some mystical carpet, the lovers did everything
that’s unachievable here—showed their somersaulting souls,
hearts’ leaps, their towered palaces of pleasure,
ladders a long time leaning in a tremble against one another
on no more ground than cloud—
suppose they could dare to do it all there,
in front of the silent, the numberless dead:
Would these spectators, then, toss down
their savings, their hidden and unknown hoard,
their still legal coins of happiness
at the feet of that genuinely smiling couple,
and upon that now gratified carpet?5
THE SIXTH ELEGY
Fig tree, for a long time it has meant much to me
how you almost forget to flower,
and then, without fanfare, force your concentrated essence
into the season’s first fruit.
Like the tube of a fountain, your arching boughs
circulate the sap, driving it down and then up,
till it leaps from sleep, though still drowsy,
into the outburst of its sweetest achievement.
Like that god gone into swan.
… But we linger,
alas, we boast about our blooming; already betrayed,
we reach the core of our fruit too late.
In a few the impulse to action is so powerful
that when the temptation to bloom lightly touches
their young mouths, their lowered eyelids,
like evening air, they are instantly tumescent:
heroes, perhaps, and those who’ve been chosen
to disappear early, whose veins the gardener of souls
has fastened like vines to a different lattice.
They race ahead of their own laughter
the way the triumphant king’s team precedes him
in those slowly receding reliefs at Karnak.
The hero strangely resembles those who die
in their youth.
Survival doesn’t concern him.
Rising composes his Being. He takes himself
on always perilous journeys into the changing
constellations of his far-off stars. Where few
could find him. But Fate, mum about us,
as if inspired, suddenly sings him like a bird
borne into the buffets of a storm. For I hear no one like him.
On an aroused wind, his dark song rushes through me.
Also, I would love to hide from my longings:
oh, to be a boy again, my life ahead,
to sit propped on my future arms and read
about Samson—how at first his mother
was barren, and then bore all.
Within you, O Mother, was he not a hero already,
didn’t his imperious choice begin there, inside you?
Thousands were stirring in that womb and wanting to be what he was.
But see: he chose and selected, he seized and used.
And if he ever pushed columns apart, it was when
he burst from the world of your body
into that temple of enemies called the world,
where he went on choosing and doing.
Oh, mothers of heroes, oh sources of raging rivers;
and you ravines into which sorrowing maidens, from the heart’s edge, have already plunged—
former and future victims of your son!
For even as the Hero overcame the labors and trials of love,
the hearts that beat harder on his behalf<
br />
could only lift him above all his obstacles,
until, already beginning to turn his back, he stood
at the end of these many smiles, another self.6
THE SEVENTH ELEGY
No more courting. Voice, you’ve outgrown seduction.
It can’t be the excuse for your song anymore,
although you sang as purely as a bird
when the soaring season lifts him, almost forgetting
he’s just an anxious creature, and not a single heart
that’s being tossed toward brightness, into a home-like heaven.
No less than he, you’d be courting some silent companion
so she’d feel you, though you’re perched out of sight,
some mate in whom a reply slowly wakens
and warms in her hearing—your ardent feeling finding a fellow flame.
Oh, and springtime would understand—there’d be
no corner that wouldn’t echo with annunciation.
First each little questioning note
would be surrounded by a confident day’s magnifying stillness.
Then the intervals between calls, the steps rising toward the anticipated temple
of what’s to come; then the trill, the way a fountain’s
falling is caught by its next jet as though in play …
With the summer ahead.
Not only all of summer’s dawns, the way they
shine before sunrise and dissolve into day.
Not only the days, so soft around flowers, and above,
shaping the trees, so purposeful and strong.
Not only the devotion of these freed forces,
not only the paths, not only meadows at evening,
not only the ozoned air after late thunder,
not only, at dusk, the onset of sleep and twilight’s premonitions …
but also the nights! the height of summer nights,
and the stars as well, the stars of the earth.
Oh, to be dead someday so as eternally to know them,
all the stars: then how, how, how to forget them!
Look, I’ve been calling my lover, but not only she would come …
Out from their crumbling graves girls would rise and gather.
How could I confine my call—once called—to just one?
Like seeds, the recently interred are always seeking the earth’s surface.
My children, one thing really relished in this world
will serve for a thousand. Never believe
that destiny is more than what’s confined to a childhood;
how often did you pass the man you loved, panting,
panting after the blissful chase, to dash into freedom?
It is breathtaking simply to be here. Girls, even you
knew, who seemed so deprived, so reduced, who became
sewers yourselves, festering in the awful alleys of the city.
For each of you had an hour, perhaps a bit less,
at worst a scarcely measurable span between while and while,
when you wholly were. Had all. Were bursting with Being.
But we easily forget what our laughing neighbor
neither confirms nor envies. We want to show it off,
yet the most apparent joy reveals itself only after
it has been transformed, when it rises within us.
My love, the world exists nowhere but within us.
Withinwarding is everything. The outer world
dwindles, and day fades from day. Where once
a solid house was, soon some invented structure
perversely suggests itself, as at ease among ideas
as if it still stood in the brain.
The Present has amassed vast stores of power,
shapeless as the vibrant energy it has stolen from the earth.
It has forgotten temples. We must save in secret
such lavish expenditures of spirit.
Yes, even where one thing we served, knelt for, and
prayed to survives, it seeks to see itself invisible.
Many have ceased perceiving it, and so will miss
the chance to enlarge it, add pillars and statues, give it grandeur, within.
Each torpid turn of the world disinherits some
to whom neither what’s been nor will be adheres.
For to humans even what comes next is far away.
We, however, should not be confused by this,
but should resolve to retain the shape in stone we still recognize.
This once stood like a standard among mankind,
stood facing fate, the destroyer, stood in the middle
of our not knowing what, why, or wherefore, as though an answer existed,
and took its design from the stars’ firm place in heaven.
Angel, to you I shall show it—there! in your eyes
it shall stand seen and redeemed at last, straight
as pillars, pylons, the sphinx, the cathedral’s
gray spire thrust up from a decaying or a foreign city.
Wasn’t it miraculous? O marvel, Angel, that we did it,
we, O great one, extol our achievements,
my breath is too short for such praise.
Because, after all, we haven’t failed to make use
of our sphere—ours—these generous spaces.
(How frightfully vast they must be,
not to have overflowed with our feelings
even after these thousands of years.)
But one tower was great, wasn’t it? O Angel, it was—
even compared to you? Chartres was great—
and music rose even higher, flew far beyond us.
Even a woman in love, alone at night by her window …
didn’t she reach your knee?
Don’t think I’m courting you, Angel.
And even if I were! You’d never come.
For my call is always full of “stay away.”
Against such a powerful current even you cannot advance.
My call is like an outstretched arm. And its upturned,
open, available hand is always in front of you,
yet only to ward off and warn,
though wide open, incomprehensible.7
THE EIGHTH ELEGY
Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner
All other creatures look into the Open
with their whole eyes. Our eyes, instead, go round the other way,
setting snares and traps on every path to freedom.
What is outside, we read solely from the animal’s gaze,
for we compel even the young child to turn and look back at preconceived things,
never to know the acceptance so deeply set inside
the animal’s face. Free from death.
It is all we see. The free animal
always has its decline behind, its god ahead,
and when it moves, it moves within eternity the way fountains flow.
We’ve never had that sort of pure space before us,
into which flowers endlessly open—no, not for a single day—
there’s always the interpreted world, and even our
abstract realms reflect a repeated yes or no:
never that pure unmonitored element one breathes,
naturally knows, and never craves. As a child
one may be absorbed by silence only to be shaken
out of it again. Or one dies and is it.
Too close to death, one may see it no longer,
to stare ahead instead, maybe with the wide eyes of animals.
Lovers approach it, and would be amazed,
were not a partner always in the way …
It opens up behind the other almost by mistake …
but no one gets beyond the other, and the world comes back again.
Continuously confronted by creation, we see there
only a dimmed reflection of the free and open.
Or some dumb animal
, with its calm eyes,
is seeing through and through us.
That’s our Fate, to be possessed by the opposite,
to see an inversion and nothing more.
If this confident creature coming toward us,
on such a different course, had our kind of consciousness,
he would spin us around and drag us in his wake.
But to him he is infinite, incomprehensible,
and because he is blind to his condition,
his outward gaze is pure. Where we see
the future, he sees all, and sees himself in everything,
he and all, whole always.
And yet upon the warm and watchful animal
there lies the weight and care of an immense sadness.
Because what often overwhelms us clings to him, too:
the remembrance that what we reach for now,
we were once tenderly tethered to. Here all is
disparity and distance, there it was heartbeat and breath.
After the first home, our second seems uncertain and cold.
Oh, the bliss of those so small they can remain in the place where they came to be;
Oh, the pleasure the midge must know, who will dance
even its wedding dance in the same world in which it was conceived.
Observe the less certain bird, from birth
almost aware of both, like one of those Etruscan
souls who has flown the corpse which was its nest,
yet where its hovering figure still forms the coffin’s lid.
How confused the bat must be: to come from a womb,
yet be called upon to fly. As if in flight from itself,
it zigzags through the air like a crack through a cup.
In the same way its wing, at dusk, crazes the porcelain surface of the sky.
And we: spectators always, everywhere,
looking on, but never beyond!
World overwhelms us. We order it. The order falls.
We rearrange it and come apart ourselves.
Who has turned us around like this,
so that whatever we do, we wear the look of someone departing?
As he who halts, one final time,
on a hill high enough
to show off his whole valley,
wavers and stops and lingers there,
we too live our lives forever taking leave.8
THE NINTH ELEGY
Reading Rilke Page 19
