The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (9 page)

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak—

mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.

In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk

devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,

tight and heavy, out of the falling folds,

no longer conscious of the delicate lyre

which had grown into his left arm, like a slip

of roses grafted onto an olive tree.

His senses felt as though they were split in two:

his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,

stop, come back, then rushing off again

would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn,—

but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.

Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached

back to the footsteps of those other two

who were to follow him, up the long path home.

But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,

or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.

He said to himself, they had to be behind him;

said it aloud and heard it fade away.

They had to be behind him, but their steps

were ominously soft. If only he could

turn around, just once (but looking back

would ruin this entire work, so near

completion), then he could not fail to see them,

those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,

a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,

his slender staff held out in front of him,

and little wings fluttering at his ankles;

and on his left arm, barely touching it:
she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came

more lament than from all lamenting women;

that a whole world of lament arose, in which

all nature reappeared: forest and valley,

road and village, field and stream and animal;

and that around this lament-world, even as

around the other earth, a sun revolved

and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-

heaven, with its own, disfigured stars—:

So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,

her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy

with child, and did not see the man in front

or the path ascending steeply into life.

Deep within herself. Being dead

filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit

suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,

she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,

she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity

and was untouchable; her sex had closed

like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands

had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s

infinitely gentle touch of guidance

hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes

who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,

no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,

and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,

poured out like fallen rain,

shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,

the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,

with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around—,

she could not understand, and softly answered

Who?

                                        Far away,

dark before the shining exit-gates,

someone or other stood, whose features were

unrecognizable. He stood and saw

how, on the strip of road among the meadows,

with a mournful look, the god of messages

silently turned to follow the small figure

already walking back along the path,

her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

Then all at once the messenger was there,

amid the simmer of wedding guests: dropped in

like the last ingredient into a bubbling pot.

They kept on drinking and did not feel the stealthy

entrance of the god, who held his aura

as tight against his body as a wet cloak,

and seemed to be like any one of them

as he walked on. But abruptly, halfway through

a sentence, one guest saw how the young master

was startled from his couch at the table’s head,

as though he had been snatched up into the air

and mirroring, all over, with all his being,

a strangeness that addressed him, horribly.

And then, as though the mixture cleared, there was

silence; on the bottom, just the dregs

of muddy noise and a precipitate

of falling babble, already giving off

the rancid smell of laughter that has turned.

For now they recognized the slender god,

and, as he stood before them, filled with his message

and unentreatable,—they almost knew.

And yet, when it was uttered, it was beyond

all understanding; none of them could grasp it.

Admetus must die. When? Within the hour.

But by this time he had broken through the shell

of his terror; and he thrust out both his hands

from the jagged holes, to bargain with the god.

For years, for only one more year of youth,

for months, for weeks, for just a few more days,

oh not for days: for nights, for just a night,

for one more night, for just this one: for this.

The god refused; and then
he
started screaming,

and screamed it out, held nothing back, screamed

as his own mother once had screamed in childbirth.

And she came up beside him, an old woman,

and his father came up also, his old father,

and both stood waiting—old, decrepit, helpless—

beside the screaming man, who, as never before

so closely, saw them, stopped, swallowed, said:

Father,

do you care about the wretched scrap of life

still left you, that will just stick in your throat?

Go spit it out. And you, old woman, old

Mother,

why should you stay here? you have given birth.

And grabbed them both, like sacrificial beasts,

in his harsh grip. Then suddenly let them go,

pushed the old couple off, inspired, beaming,

breathing hard and calling: Creon! Creon!

And nothing else; and nothing but that name.

Yet in his features stood the other name

he could not utter, namelessly expectant

as, glowing, he held it out to the young guest,

his dearest friend, across the bewildered table.

These two old people (it stood there) are no ransom,

they are used up, exhausted, nearly worthless,

but you, Creon, you, in all your beauty—

But now he could no longer see his friend,

who stayed behind; and what came forth was
she
,

almost a little smaller than as he knew her,

slight and sad in her pale wedding dress.

All the others are just her narrow path,

down which she comes and comes—: (soon she will be

there, in his arms, which painfully have opened).

But while he waits, she speaks; though not to him.

She is speaking to the god, and the god listens,

and all can hear, as though within the god:

No one can be his ransom: only I can.

I
am
his ransom. For no one else has finished

with life as I have. What is left for me

of everything I once was? Just my dying.

Didn’t she tell you when she sent you down here

that the bed waiting inside belongs to death?

For I have taken leave. No one dying

takes more than that. I left so that all this,

buried beneath the man who is now my husband,

might fade and vanish—. Come: lead me away:

already I have begun to die, for him.

And veering like a wind on the high seas,

the god approached as though she were already

dead, and instantly was there beside her,

far from her husband, to whom, with an abrupt

nod, he tossed the hundred lives of earth.

The young man hurried, staggering, toward the two

and grasped at them as in a dream. But now

they had nearly reached the entrance, which was crowded

with sobbing women. One more time he saw

the girl’s face, for just a moment, turning toward him

with a smile that was as radiant as a hope

and almost was a promise: to return

from out of the abyss of death, grown fully,

to him, who was still alive—

At that, he flung

his hands before his own face, as he knelt there,

in order to see nothing but that smile.

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

They had, for a while, grown used to him. But after

they lit the kitchen lamp and in the dark

it began to burn, restlessly, the stranger

was altogether strange. They washed his neck,

and since they knew nothing about his life

they lied till they produced another one,

as they kept washing. One of them had to cough,

and while she coughed she left the vinegar sponge,

dripping, upon his face. The other stood

and rested for a minute. A few drops fell

from the stiff scrub-brush, as his horrible

contorted hand was trying to make the whole

room aware that he no longer thirsted.

And he did let them know. With a short cough,

as if embarrassed, they both began to work

more hurriedly now, so that across

the mute, patterned wallpaper their thick

shadows reeled and staggered as if bound

in a net; till they had finished washing him.

The night, in the uncurtained window-frame,

was pitiless. And one without a name

lay clean and naked there, and gave commands.

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place

your sight can knock on, echoing; but here

within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze

will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else

can ease him, charges into his dark night

howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels

the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen

into her, so that, like an audience,

she can look them over, menacing and sullen,

and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;

and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,

inside the golden amber of her eyeballs

suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

With all the subtle paints of Fragonard

no more of their red and white could be expressed

than someone would convey about his mistress

by telling you, “She was lovely, lying there

still soft with sleep.” They rise above the green

grass and lightly sway on their long pink stems,

side by side, like enormous feathery blossoms,

seducing (more seductively than Phryne)

themselves; till, necks curling, they sink their large

pale eyes into the softness of their down,

where apple-red and jet-black lie concealed.

A shriek of envy shakes the parrot cage;

but
they
stretch out, astonished, and one by one

stride into their imaginary world.

Center of all centers, core of cores,

almond self-enclosed and growing sweet—

all this universe, to the furthest stars

and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;

your vast shell reaches into endless space,

and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.

Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,

blazing high above your head.

But
in
you is the presence that

will be, when all the stars are dead.

I have my dead, and I have let them go,

and was amazed to see them so contented,

so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,

so unlike their reputation. Only you

return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock

against something, so that the sound reveals

your presence. Oh don’t take from me what I

am slowly learning. I’m sure you have gone astray

if you are moved to homesickness for anything

in this dimension. We transform these Things;

they aren’t real, they are only the reflections

upon the polished surface of our being.

    I thought you were much further on. It troubles me

that
you
should stray back, you, who have achieved

more transformation than any other woman.

That we were frightened when you died … no; rather:

that your stern death broke in upon us, darkly,

wrenching the till-then from the ever-since—

this concerns
us
: setting it all in order

is the task we have continually before us.

But that you too were frightened, and even now

pulse with your fear, where fear can have no meaning;

that you have lost even the smallest fragment

of your eternity, Paula, and have entered

here, where nothing yet exists; that out there,

bewildered for the first time, inattentive,

you didn’t grasp the splendor of the infinite

forces, as on earth you grasped each Thing;

that, from the realm which already had received you,

the gravity of some old discontent

has dragged you back to measurable time—:

this often startles me out of dreamless sleep

at night, like a thief climbing in my window.

If I could say it is only out of kindness,

out of your great abundance, that you have come,

because you are so secure, so self-contained,

that you can wander anywhere, like a child,

not frightened of any harm that might await you …

But no: you’re pleading. This penetrates me, to

my very bones, and cuts at me like a saw.

The bitterest rebuke your ghost could bring me,

could scream to me, at night, when I withdraw

into my lungs, into my intestines,

into the last bare chamber of my heart,—

such bitterness would not chill me half so much

as this mute pleading. What is it that you want?

    Tell me, must I travel? Did you leave

some Thing behind, some place, that cannot bear

your absence? Must I set out for a country

you never saw, although it was as vividly

near to you as your own senses were?

    I will sail its rivers, search its valleys, inquire

about its oldest customs; I will stand

for hours, talking with women in their doorways

and watching, while they call their children home.

I will see the way they wrap the land around them

in their ancient work in field and meadow; will ask

to be led before their king; will bribe the priests

to take me to their temple, before the most

powerful of the statues in their keeping,

and to leave me there, shutting the gates behind them.

And only then, when I have learned enough,

I will go to watch the animals, and let

something of their composure slowly glide

into my limbs; will see my own existence

deep in their eyes, which hold me for a while

and let me go, serenely, without judgment.

I will have the gardeners come to me and recite

many flowers, and in the small clay pots

of their melodious names I will bring back

some remnant of the hundred fragrances.

And fruits: I will buy fruits, and in their sweetness

that country’s earth and sky will live again.

    For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.

You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,

and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.

Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded

from inside, into the shapes of their existence.

And at last, you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped

out of your clothes and brought your naked body

before the mirror, you let yourself inside

down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,

and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.

So free of curiosity your gaze

had become, so unpossessive, of such true

poverty, it had no desire even

for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.

    And that is how I have cherished you—deep inside

the mirror, where you put yourself, far away

from all the world. Why have you come like this

and so denied yourself? Why do you want

to make me think that in the amber beads

you wore in your self-portrait, there was still

a kind of heaviness that can’t exist

in the serene heaven of paintings? Why do you show me

an evil omen in the way you stand?

What makes you read the contours of your body

like the lines engraved inside a palm, so that

I cannot see them now except as fate?

    Come into the candlelight. I’m not afraid

to look the dead in the face. When they return,

they have a right, as much as other Things do,

to pause and refresh themselves within our vision.

    Come; and we will be silent for a while.

Look at this rose on the corner of my desk:

isn’t the light around it just as timid

as the light on you? It too should not be here,

it should have bloomed or faded in the garden,

outside, never involved with me. But now

it lives on in its small porcelain vase:

what meaning does it find in my awareness?

    
Don’t be frightened if I understand it now;

it’s rising in me, ah, I’m trying to grasp it,

must
grasp it, even if I die of it. Must grasp

that you are here. As a blind man grasps an object,

I feel your fate, although I cannot name it.

Let us lament together that someone pulled you

out of your mirror’s depths. Can you still cry?

No: I see you can’t. You turned your tears’

strength and pressure into your ripe gaze,

and were transforming every fluid inside you

into a strong reality, which would rise

and circulate, in equilibrium, blindly.

Then, for the last time, chance came in and tore you

back, from the last step forward on your path,

into a world where bodies have their will.

Not all at once: tore just a shred at first;

but when, around this shred, day after day,

the objective world expanded, swelled, grew heavy—

you needed your whole self; and so you went

and broke yourself, out of its grip, in pieces,

painfully, because your need was great.

Then from the night-warm soilbed of your heart

you dug the seeds, still green, from which your death

would sprout: your own, your perfect death, the one

that was your whole life’s perfect consummation.

And swallowed down the kernels of your death,

like all the other ones, swallowed them, and were

startled to find an aftertaste of sweetness

you hadn’t planned on, a sweetness on your lips, you

who inside your senses were so sweet already.

    Ah let us lament. Do you know how hesitantly,

how reluctantly your blood, when you called it back,

returned from its incomparable circuit?

How confused it was to take up once again

the body’s narrow circulation; how,

full of mistrust and astonishment, it came

flowing into the placenta and suddenly

was exhausted by the long journey home.

You drove it on, you pushed it forward, you dragged it

up to the hearth, as one would drag a terrified

animal to the sacrificial altar;

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

Finally, you forced it: it was happy,

it ran up and surrendered. And you thought,

because you had grown used to other measures,

that this would be for just a little while.

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

And time goes on, and time grows large, and time

is like a relapse after a long illness.

    How short your life seems, if you now compare it

with those empty hours you passed in silence, bending

the abundant strengths of your abundant future

out of their course, into the new child-seed

that once again was fate. A painful task:

a task beyond all strength. But you performed it

day after day, you dragged yourself in front of it;

you pulled the lovely weft out of the loom

and wove your threads into a different pattern.

And still had courage enough for celebration.

    When it was done, you wished to be rewarded,

like children when they have swallowed down the draught

of bittersweet tea that perhaps will make them well.

So you chose your own reward, being still so far

removed from people, even then, that no one

could have imagined what reward would please you.

But you yourself knew. You sat up in your childbed

and in front of you was a mirror, which gave back

everything. And this everything was you,

and right in front; inside was mere deception,

the sweet deception of every woman who smiles

as she puts her jewelry on and combs her hair.

    And so you died as women used to die,

at home, in your own warm bedroom, the old-fashioned

death of women in labor, who try to close

themselves again but can’t, because that ancient

darkness which they have also given birth to

returns for them, thrusts its way in, and enters.

    
Once, ritual lament would have been chanted;

women would have been paid to beat their breasts

and howl for you all night, when all is silent.

Where can we find such customs now? So many

have long since disappeared or been disowned.

That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve

the lament that we omitted. Can you hear me?

I would like to fling my voice out like a cloth

over the fragments of your death, and keep

pulling at it until it is torn to pieces,

and all my words would have to walk around

shivering, in the tatters of that voice;

if lament were enough. But now I must accuse:

not the man who withdrew you from yourself

(I cannot find him; he looks like everyone),

but in this one man, I accuse: all men.

    When somewhere, from deep within me, there arises

the vivid sense of having been a child,

the purity and essence of that childhood

where I once lived: then I don’t want to know it.

I want to form an angel from that sense

and hurl him upward, into the front row

of angels who scream out, reminding God.

    For this suffering has lasted far too long;

none of us can bear it; it is too heavy—

this tangled suffering of spurious love

which, building on convention like a habit,

calls itself just, and fattens on injustice.

Show me a man with the right to his possession.

Who can possess what cannot hold its own self,

but only, now and then, will blissfully

catch itself, then quickly throw itself

away, like a child playing with a ball.

As little as a captain can hold the carved

Nikē facing outward from his ship’s prow

when the lightness of her godhead suddenly

lifts her up, into the bright sea-wind:

so little can one of us call back the woman

who, now no longer seeing us, walks on

along the narrow strip of her existence

as though by miracle, in perfect safety—

unless, that is, he wishes to do wrong.

    For
this
is wrong, if anything is wrong:

not to enlarge the freedom of a love

with all the inner freedom one can summon.

We need, in love, to practice only this:

letting each other go. For holding on

comes easily; we do not need to learn it.