Reading Rilke (27 page)

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

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.