A bit of poetry.

I love Rainer Maria Rilke.

The Second Elegy

Any angel is frightening.
Yet, because I know of you,
I invoke you in spite of myself,
you lethal birds of soul.

Were the archangel, the dangerous one
beyond the stars, to move down now
one step closer to us, we would die
from the fear in our own hearts.

Who are you?

Fated to be happy from the beginning of time,
creation's spoiled immortal darlings,
summits of the cosmos shining at dawn,
pollen from heavenly blossoms, limbs of light,
hallways, stairs, thrones carved from existence,
shields of ecstasy, shrines for delight -
and suddenly, each one, mirror:
where our own evanescent beauty
is gathered into an enduring countenance.

But we, when we feel, evaporate.
We breathe ourselves out and gone.
Like the glow of an ember,
the fragrance we give off grows weaker.
One could well say to us,
"You have entered my blood,
this room, this springtime is full of you..."
What use is that when he cannot hold us
and we disappear into him and around him?

And those who are beautiful -
who can keep them as they are?
Unceasingly in their faces
the life in them arises and goes forth.
Like dew from morning grass,
like steam from a plate of food,
what is ours goes out from us.

Where does a smile go, or the upward glance,
the sudden warm movement of the heart?
Yet that is what we are. Does the universe
we dissolve into
taste of us a little?
Do the angels radiate only their own
outflowing essence,
or is there sometimes, by some oversight,
a bit of ours in it as well?
Are we mixed into their features,
even if only vaguely
as the openness in the faces
of pregnant women?
The angels themselves
don't notice. How could they?

Lovers, if they understood this,
could say wonderful things to each other
in the night. But it seems
our own impermanence is concealed from us.
The trees stand firm, the houses we live in
are still there. We alone
flow past it all, an exchange of air.

Everything conspires to silence us,
partly with shame,
partly with unspeakable hope.

Lovers, you who are for a while
sufficient to each other,
help me understand who we are.
You hold each other. Have you proof?
See, my hands hold each other too.
I put my used-up face in them.
It helps me feel known.
Just from that, can we believe we endure?
You, however, who increase
through each other's delight,
you who ripen in each other's hands
like grapes in a vintage year:
I'm asking you
who we are.

You touch one another so reverently;
as though your caresses
could keep each place they cover
from disappearing. As though, underneath, you could sense
that which will always exist.
So, as you embrace, you promise each other eternity.

And yet, when that first look
struck terror in you,
and you stood at the window, longing,
and you walked together, just once,
through the garden: Lovers,
are you still who you were then?
When you lift the other to your mouth
to drink each other - drink to drink:
ah, how strangely the drinker fades from the act.

Haven't you been moved, in those early Greek carvings,
by the care you see in human gesture?
Weren't love and loss so gently laid upon the shoulders
that people seemed made of different stuff
than in our day?

Think of the hands, how they touch without pressure,
although there is strength in the torso.
These figures seem to know,
"We have come this far.
This is given to us, to touch
each other this way.
The gods may lean on us more strongly,
but that is their nature."

We may yearn to come to rest
in some small piece of pure humanity,
a strip of orchard between river and rock.
But our own heart is too vast to be contained there.
We can no longer seek it in a place
or even in the image of a god or an angel.