"We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it."
-Rainer Maria Rilke

And where begins the night?
-Rilke, "Girl in Love"


the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.
-Rilke, "Remembrance"


leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life
-Rilke, "Sunset"

Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.


-Rainer Maria Rilke

Dedication to M

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Swing of the heart. O firmly hung, fastened on what invisible branch. Who, who gave you the push, that you swung with me into the leaves? How near I was to the exquisite fruits. But not-staying is the essence of this motion. Only the nearness, only toward the forever-too-high, all at once the possible nearness. Vicinities, then from an irresistibly swung-up-to place --already, once again, lost--the new sight, the outlook. And now: the commanded return back and across and into equilbrium's arms. Below, in between, hesitation, the pull of earth, the passage through the turning-point of the heavy--, past it: and the catapult stretches, weighted with the heart's curiosity, to the other side, opposite, upward. Again how different, how new! How they envy each other at the ends of the rope, these opposite halves of pleasure. Or, shall I dare it: these quarters?--And include, since it witholds itself, that other half-circle, the one whose impetus pushes the swing? I'm not just imagining it, as the mirror of my here-and-now arc. Guess nothing. It will be newer someday. But from endpoint to endpoint of the arc that I have most dared, I already fully possess it: overflowings from me plunge over to it and fill it, stretch it apart, almost. And my own parting, when the force that pushes me someday stops, makes it all the more near. P.S. Happy Birthday to: Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Italo Calvino, P.G. Wodehouse, and Mario Puzo. Libras, all.

From Rilke:

Lingering, even among what's most intimate,
is not our option.

***

...Here falling
is our best. From the mastered emotion
we fall over into the half-sensed, onward and onward.

***

Only you
drift like the moon. And down below, your nocturnal
landscape grows bright and darkens--

-from "To Holderlin"-

My shy moonshadow would like to speak
with my sunshadow from far away
in the language of fools;

-Muzot, mid-February 1922-

from Uncollected Poems

Rilke: Paris, April 1913

Overflowing heavens of squandered stars
flame brilliantly above your troubles. Instead
of into your pillows, weep up toward them.
There, at the already weeping, at the ending visage,
slowly thinning out, ravishing
worldspace begins. Who will interrupt,
once you force your way there,
the current? No one. You may panic,
and fight that overwhelming course of stars
that streams toward you. Breathe.
Breathe the darkness of the earth and again
look up! Again. Lightly and facelessly
depths lean toward you from above. The serene
countenance dissolved in night makes room for yours.

-Rainer Maria Rilke Uncollected Poems, trans. Edward Snow, p. 57-

How to Read a Poem

...
when I recall how I've dipped tenderness
into blood, into that never startled
soundless heartblood of things so loved

Toledo, November 1912
p. 25, Rainer Maria Rilke: Uncollected Poems
translated by Edward Snow



Revisiting Rilke, I realized that I'd almost forgotten how achingly beautiful poetry can be--how reading the words make images float, leaving one transfixed after taking them in.

Someone once told me, "teach me how to read this poem," and I said, "I cannot teach, nor show you, how to read poetry. You have to learn it on your own, and that would mean a lifetime of reading. Got that? A lifetime. Read. Drink the words in, turn them over in your mind, sketch and paint them in the colors that they speak to you. You may, or may not, see the story there is in the poem, the nuances in the language, the gradations in its meaning; your well of experiences, in turn, will be the scale that will measure the depth with which it speaks to you. Read, read the words, and love them. And then you would have taught yourself poetry."

Revisiting Rilke

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Duino, late autumn 1911

p. 15

The Panther

by Rainer Maria Rilke

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

This is the Rilke I fell in love with, the poem that led me to search for his The Sonnets To Orpheus and buy it, no matter what the cost:

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

From 'Ahead of All Parting:The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke'
Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell