The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (8 page)

It wasn’t in me. It went out and in.

I wanted to hold it. It held, with Wine.

(I no longer know what it was.)

Then Wine held this and held that for me

till I came to depend on him totally.

Like an ass.

Now I’m playing his game and he deals me out

with a sneer on his lips, and maybe tonight

he will lose me to Death, that boor.

When
he
wins me, filthiest card in the deck,

he’ll take me and scratch the scabs on his neck,

then toss me into the mire.

They’re not in my way. They let me be.

They say that nothing can happen to me.

How good.

Nothing can happen. All things flow

from the Holy Ghost, and they come and go

around that particular Ghost (you know)—,

how good.

No we really mustn’t imagine there is

any danger in any of this.

Of course, there’s blood.

Blood is the hardest. Hard as stone.

Sometimes I think that I can’t go on—.

(How good.)

Oh look at that beautiful ball over there:

red and round as an Everywhere.

Good that you made it be.

If I call, will it come to me?

How very strange the world can appear,

blending and breaking, far and near:

friendly, a little bit unclear.

How good.

My soul itself may be straight and good;

ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,

all the distortions that hurt me inside—

it buckles under these things.

It has no garden, it has no sun,

it hangs on my twisted skeleton

and, terrified, flaps its wings.

Nor are my hands of much use. Look here:

see how shrunken and shapeless they are:

clumsily hopping, clammy and fat,

like toads after the rain.

And everything else about me is torn,

sad and weather-beaten and worn;

why did God ever hesitate

to flush it all down the drain?

Is it because he’s angry at me

for my face with its moping lips?

It was so often ready to be

light and clear in its depths;

but nothing came so close to it

as big dogs did.

And dogs don’t have what I need.

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

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 tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

Gazella Dorcas

Enchanted thing: how can two chosen words

ever attain the harmony of pure rhyme

that pulses through you as your body stirs?

Out of your forehead branch and lyre climb,

and all your features pass in simile, through

the songs of love whose words, as light as rose-

petals, rest on the face of someone who

has put his book away and shut his eyes:

to see you: tensed, as if each leg were a gun

loaded with leaps, but not fired while your neck

holds your head still, listening: as when,

while swimming in some isolated place,

a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look:

the forest pool reflected in her face.

This laboring through what is still undone,

as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,

is like the awkward walking of the swan.

And dying—to let go, no longer feel

the solid ground we stand on every day—

is like his anxious letting himself fall

into the water, which receives him gently

and which, as though with reverence and joy,

draws back past him in streams on either side;

while, infinitely silent and aware,

in his full majesty and ever more

indifferent, he condescends to glide.

All this stood upon her and was the world

and stood upon her with all its fear and grace

as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless

yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,

and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.

And she endured it all: bore up under

the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,

the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,

serenely as a woman carrying water

moves with a full jug. Till in the midst of play,

transfiguring and preparing for the future,

the first white veil descended, gliding softly

over her opened face, almost opaque there,

never to be lifted off again, and somehow

giving to all her, questions just one answer:

In you, who were a child once—in you.

She sat just like the others at the table.

But on second glance, she seemed to hold her cup

a little differently as she picked it up.

She smiled once. It was almost painful.

And when they finished and it was time to stand

and slowly, as chance selected them, they left

and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),

I saw her. She was moving far behind

the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon

have to sing before a large assembly;

upon her eyes, which were radiant with joy,

light played as on the surface of a pool.

She followed slowly, taking a long time,

as though there were some obstacle in the way;

and yet: as though, once it was overcome,

she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

Suddenly, from all the green around you,

something—you don’t know what—has disappeared;

you feel it creeping closer to the window,

in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,

reminding you of someone’s
Saint Jerome:

so much solitude and passion come

from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide

away from us, cautiously, as though

they weren’t supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now:

the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long

childhood hours when you were so afraid.

(By permission of Frau Nonna)

And night and distant rumbling; now the army’s

carrier-train was moving out, to war.

He looked up from the harpsichord, and as

he went on playing, he looked across at her

almost as one might gaze into a mirror:

so deeply was her every feature filled

with his young features, which bore his pain and were

more beautiful and seductive with each sound.

Then, suddenly, the image broke apart.

She stood, as though distracted, near the window

and felt the violent drum-beats of her heart.

His playing stopped. From outside, a fresh wind blew.

And strangely alien on the mirror-table

stood the black shako with its ivory skull.

In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feel

something far off. Around the lips, a great

freshness—seductive, though there is no smile.

Under the rows of ornamental braid

on the slim Imperial officer’s uniform:

the saber’s basket-hilt. Both hands stay

folded upon it, going nowhere, calm

and now almost invisible, as if they

were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.

And all the rest so curtained with itself,

so cloudy, that I cannot understand

this figure as it fades into the background—.

Oh quickly disappearing photograph

in my more slowly disappearing hand.

The stamina of an old, long-noble race

in the eyebrows’ heavy arches. In the mild

blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child

and, here and there, humility—not a fool’s,

but feminine: the look of one who serves.

The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,

composed, yet not unwilling to speak out

when necessary. The forehead still naive,

most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

This, as a whole, just hazily foreseen—

never, in any joy or suffering,

collected for a firm accomplishment;

and yet, as though, from far off, with scattered Things,

a serious, true work were being planned.

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white

flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:

with the audience around her, quickened, hot,

her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair

and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress

into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace

from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long

naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight

around her body, she takes and flings it out

haughtily, with an imperious gesture,

and watches: it lies raging on the floor,

still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die—.

Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet

exultant smile, she looks up finally

and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

They lie in their long hair, and the brown faces

have long ago withdrawn into themselves.

Eyes shut, as though before too great a distance.

Skeletons, mouths, flowers. Inside the mouths,

the shiny teeth like rows of pocket chessmen.

And flowers, yellow pearls, slender bones,

hands and tunics, woven cloth decaying

over the shriveled heart. But there, beneath

those rings, beneath the talismans and gems

and precious stones like blue eyes (lovers’ keepsakes),

there still remains the silent crypt of sex,

filled to its vaulted roof with flower-petals.

And yellow pearls again, unstrung and scattered,

vessels of fired clay on which their own

portraits once were painted, the green fragments

of perfume jars that smelled like flowers, and images

of little household gods upon their altars:

courtesan-heavens with enraptured gods.

Broken waistbands, scarabs carved in jade,

small statues with enormous genitals,

a laughing mouth, dancing-girls, runners,

golden clasps that look like tiny bows

for shooting bird- and beast-shaped amulets,

ornamented knives and spoons, long needles,

a roundish light-red potsherd upon which

the stiff legs of a team of horses stand

like the dark inscription above an entryway.

And flowers again, pearls that have rolled apart,

the shining flanks of a little gilded lyre;

and in between the veils that fall like mist,

as though it had crept out from the shoe’s chrysalis:

the delicate pale butterfly of the ankle.

And so they lie, filled to the brim with Things,

expensive Things, jewels, toys, utensils,

broken trinkets (how much fell into them!)

and they darken as a river’s bottom darkens.

For they
were
riverbeds once,

and over them in brief, impetuous waves

(each wanting to prolong itself, forever)

the bodies of countless adolescents surged;

and in them roared the currents of grown men.

And sometimes boys would burst forth from the mountains

of childhood, would descend in timid streams

and play with what they found on the river’s bottom,

until the steep slope gripped their consciousness:

Then they filled, with clear, shallow water,

the whole breadth of this broad canal, and set

little whirlpools turning in the depths,

and for the first time mirrored the green banks

and distant calls of birds—, while in the sky

the starry nights of another, sweeter country

blossomed above them and would never close.

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.

Like veins of silver ore, they silently

moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up

among the roots, on its way to the world of men,

and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.

Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,

and forests made of mist. There were bridges

spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake

which hung above its distant bottom

like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.

And through the gentle, unresisting meadows

one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.