Reading Rilke (17 page)

into my lungs, my guts,

into the emptied chambers of my heart—

such a protest would not be as grotesque

as this pleading is. What do you want?

Tell me, should I travel? Did you leave some

Thing behind that runs after you now in vain?

Should I set out for a country you never saw,

though it was the other half of all you knew?

I shall sail its rivers, search its earth, and ask

about its oldest customs, speaking with women in their doorways,

and watching when they call their children home.

I shall see how they wrap their world around them

when they work the fields and graze their meadows.

I shall ask to be brought before their king,

and bribe the priests to take me to their temple,

so I may prostrate myself before their most powerful idol,

and have them leave me there, after latching the gates.

But then, when I have learned enough,

I shall simply watch the animals until

something of their serenity slowly

seeps into my limbs; I shall see myself

held deep inside their eyes until gradually,

calmly, indifferently, I’m released.

I shall have gardeners recite to me

the many flowers so I can bring back

in the pots of their proper names

some trace of a hundred scents.

And I shall buy fruits, too, fruits in whose juice

a country’s earth will rise to join its sky.

For fruit you understood: ripe fruits.

You set them out in bowls before you,

and on a scale of colors weighed their worth.

You saw women, too, as fruit; children as well,

since they grew the shapes of their existence

as if from a seed inside.

And finally you saw yourself so—as a fruit.

Peeling from your clothes, you brought

your nakedness before a mirror,

and waded in up to your gaze, which stayed wide-eyed,

in front, and did not say: I’m that; no:
this is
.

You looked with such a lack of curiosity,

so impersonally and with the poverty of the pure,

you weren’t attracted even by yourself: now holy.

I’d like to keep you where you put yourself—

in the deeps of the mirror, away from the world.

Why have you come in this different way?

Why do you deny yourself? Why do you want

to make me think that in the amber beads

you wore in your portrait there was still

a heaviness of the sort that can’t survive

in the serenity of peaceful pictures? Why does

your posture seem to show an evil omen?

What makes you read the contours of your body

like lines on the palm of a hand,

so that I cannot see them otherwise than Fate?

Come into the candlelight. I’m not afraid

to look the dead in the face. When they come back

they have a right, as much as other things,

to the hospitality of our gaze.

Come; we’ll be together silent for a while.

Look at this rose on my writing desk:

isn’t the light around it just as shy

as that which shines around you? It too has no business here.

It ought to have bloomed or perished in the garden

out there quite apart from me,

yet here it is, unaware of my awareness.

Don’t be frightened if I finally understand,

for—oh!—I feel it rising in me; I can do nothing else,

I must grasp and grant it, even if I die in doing so.

I must concede that you are here.

Just as a blind man touches something,

I feel your Fate, although I cannot name it.

Let us grieve together that someone

withdrew you from your mirror. Can you still cry?

You can’t. Long ago you turned the strength and abundance of your tears

into a richly ripe gaze, and were transforming

everything vital that was flowing in you

into a more powerful reality—

rising and circling, poised but wild.

Then chance drew you back, utmost chance

drew you back from the last step needed to advance,

back into a world where the body’s blood rules.

Not all of you at once, but bit by bit;

but when, around these bits, the world,

like pus around a wound, grew,

then you needed the whole self you no longer had,

and, against the rules, broke yourself further, fell into painful fragments,

as you had to, because you so needed
you
.

Then, bearing yourself away, you grubbed

from your nightwarm heartsoil the green seeds

from which your death was meant to sprout:

yours, your own death, the proper outcome of your life.

And you ate, you ate the kernels of your own death

as you would eat any grain, ate them all,

to find an aftertaste of sweetness

you hadn’t expected, lurking, a sweetness on your lips,

you: who inside the sensations of your senses

were so sweet already.

Ah … let us lament. Do you know with what hesitation,

what reluctance, your blood, when you called it back,

gave up its commitment to an incomparable circulation?

how confused it became when asked to take up

once again the restricted circuits of the body?

how, full of mistrust and astonishment, it flowed

into the placenta again, exhausted suddenly

from the long journey home?

You drove it on, you pushed it ahead,

you dragged it to the hearth like a herd to be sacrificed,

and wanted it, despite all that, to be happy.

Finally you conquered: it
was
happy;

it showed a flag and surrendered. You believed,

because you’d got used to those other measures,

that it would remain only for a time.

But now you were
in
time, and time is long.

And time goes on, and time adds up, and time

is like a relapse after a lengthy illness.

How short your life seems if you now compare it

with the hours you sat before your overflowing art

and its overflowing future, diverting their course

to stir the seed that would become your child,

and, once again, your Fate. A bitter business.

Labor exceeding strength. Yet you performed it.

Day after day you dragged yourself to the loom

and pulled out its lovely work and rewove

its threads into another pattern.

And still had energy enough for a celebration.

When it was done you wanted to be rewarded,

like children who’ve drunk the bittersweet tea

that was supposed to make them well.

So you rewarded yourself, since you were still

so far away from everyone, even after this, that no one

could have guessed what reward would please.

But you knew. You sat up in your childbed

to confront a mirror that gave back everything.

Now that image was all of you,
out there
,

inside was mere deception, the sweet deceit

of every woman who tries a smile while

she puts on her jewelry and combs her hair.

And so you died as women used to die,

died in your own warm house,

died the old-fashioned death of childbearing women

who try to close themselves again but cannot do it,

because that darkness that they also bore

comes back again and bullies its way in like a callous lover.

Even so, shouldn’t someone have rounded up

a few wailing-women. Women who will weep for money,

and if well paid will howl for you all night,

when otherwise all is quiet.

Customs! We haven’t nearly enough customs.

All gone and out of use.

So that’s what you had to come back for:

the mourning that was omitted. Do you hear mine?

I should like to clothe you in my cries,

cover the sharp shatters of your death,

and tug till the cloth is all in rags, so my poor words

would have to shuffle around

shivering in the tatters of their sound—

as if lamentation were enough. But now I accuse:

not the one who withdrew you from yourself

(I cannot find him hereabouts, he looks like all the others),

but through him I accuse … I accuse all men.

If, from somewhere deep inside me,

there were to arise a childlife I hadn’t been aware of,

perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,

I wouldn’t want to know it. Without looking,

I’d make an angel of it, hurl it into the front row

of those weeping angels who remember God.

For this sort of suffering has gone on long enough;

and no one’s learned to bear it; it’s too hard for us,

the insane suffering of spurious love

that, upheld by the precepts of custom,

calls itself Right and prospers from the Wrong.

Where is the man with the rights of such possession,

who can control what cannot even possess itself,

but will now and then happily catch hold,

only to toss itself away again like a child’s ball?

As little as a captain can keep the carved Nike

facing forward from his ship’s prow

when the inner lightness of her divinity

whisks her away on a wave of wind;

so little can one of us call back the woman

who, now no longer heeding us, sets forth

on the wire-thin strip of her existence

without a misstep, as if by a miracle—

unless our pleasure and profession is to wrong.

For
this
is wrong, if anything is wrong:

not to increase the freedom of a love

with all the inner freedom one can muster.

We have, where we love, only this:

we must allow each other to grow great, because diminishing

comes easily to us and doesn’t need to be learned.

Are you still there? In what corner are you?

You understood so much, you did so much;

You passed through life as open as daybreak.

Women suffer; loving is lonely;

and artists in their work sometimes sense,

where they love, the need for transmutation.

You began both; both live in that

which fame distorts by taking it away.

Oh, you were far from all fame. You were

inconspicuous; had gently withdrawn your beauty

as one lowers a festive flag

on the gray morning of a working day.

You had but one wish, for a lifetime of work—