A Year with Rilke

With our thanks

2012-01-01T06:30:00.001+01:00

Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems appropriate that we, Ruth and Lorenzo, feel both sadness and joy as we close out this year of Rilke readings, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Perhaps it was not possible to read 365 days of Rilke’s poems, letters and journal entries without wholeness blooming in us out of what may have once felt separate: sorrow and joy; the visible and the invisible; transience and permanence; dread and bliss; materiality and spirituality; life and death. Has he taught us to stop resisting darkness, dread, and death? From this daily practice, we feel transformed, actually believing in the necessity, and even the beauty, of paradox—of both loss and gain—hidden within the mysteries of existence. So we embrace our sadness at the end of this year, in union with the joy of having experienced it with you, our readers.

Most importantly, we feel thankful for having Rainer Maria Rilke's incantatory writing to share here, his incomparable and often breathtaking poems, letters and journal entries that have filled the wonderful book A Year with Rilke. Over the year, many readers and participants have thanked us here and elsewhere for this blog, but we cannot help but feel that such gratitude and all accolades, though ever so warmly received, are misplaced and truly must go the poet himself and to his translators and the editors of that volume: Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

Anita Barrows

So let us praise here the work of Anita and Joanna. As we have noted on the sidebar of this blog, translation of poetry is a tremendous challenge, yet day after day, through their efforts, we received the wonder of what lies hidden inside words and can only truly be transposed in the heart.

Joanna Macy

We would like to direct you to their Web sites, where you can discover other facets of their work. Here is Barrows' page at the Wright Institute, about her extraordinary clinical work with children, adolescents and adults with autism, based in Jungian practice. Here is a link to some of her poetry, quite beautiful.

Here is a link to Joanna Macy's wikipedia page, including a list of her published books. And here is Macy's personal Web page, about her fascinating work called Experiential Deep Psychology, reconnecting with the earth to restore wholeness.

Importantly, and with great affection, we wish also to thank you, our dear readers and commenters, for the beautiful contributions you have made this year. Without you, this enterprise would have been far less rich and full. So often you have shone your light on passages, illuminating even greater depth and power in what Rilke wrote.

* * *

Yesterday's post brought us Rilke's Flower of Farewell, a piece that strikes us as a magnificent crowning touch to our yearlong immersion in Rilke. Three short lines that capture so much, the essence perhaps, of the life-philosophy abuzz in all his writing ...

Somewhere the flower of farewell is blooming.

Endlessly it yields its pollen, which we breathe.

Even in the breeze of this beginning hour we breathe farewell.

Here as always in his writing, Rilke unites awareness of beginnings and blooming with a penetrating perception of departing and farewell, in an intense dual mindfulness in which death is not the end of life, but precisely what makes it whole, what gives us its full measure. And the flower of farewell, endlessly releasing its pollen, summons to our innermost ears the buzz of bees, of Rilkean bees, those “bees of the invisible" he called on all of us to become when he commanded us to transform the world about us:

Transform? Yes, for it is our task to impress this provisional, transient earth upon ourselves so deeply, so agonizingly, and so passionately that its essence rises up again “invisibly” within us. We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.

So what next, fellow Rilke readers and friends? How to heed that transformative call? Perhaps all of us, each in our own way, are seeking to answer that call on our personal blogs. And as for the two hosts of this blog that bids farewell today (and never), we would like to peel back the curtain here and give you a glimpse of where the currents of this new year's airs are taking the pollen from last year's flower of farewell ...

Fresh blooms, a new blog venture for us

Inspired by how much we have enjoyed our year here with all of you, we would like to invite you to join us at a new blog that the two of us will host. Every few days at sparks and mirrors we will share fragments and figments of writings that inspire us and, hopefully, our readers too. It is our desire that those who read will actively participate, with their own input, much as so many of you have done over the past year on the Rilke blog. There will be reprises of Rilke, as well as echoes of Rumi and other writers we admire. So we warmly invite you all to follow the pollen path from yesterday's post over to sparks and mirrors...

The Flower of Farewell

2011-12-31T05:30:00.006+01:00

bee with pollen

photo by Ruth

Somewhere the flower of farewell is blooming.
Endlessly it yields its pollen, which we breathe.
Even in the breeze of this beginning hour we breathe farewell.

Uncollected Poems

Last Thing

2011-12-30T05:30:00.002+01:00

The Artist at the Window

by Paul Klee

Come, you last thing. I recognize you,
unholy agony in the body's weave.
Just as I burned in my mind, now I burn in you.
The wood has long resisted, holding back
from the flames you ignite—
now I feed you and blaze in you.
In the grip of your rage my natural mildness
becomes a raging hell, unlike anything.
Quite pure, free of all thoughts,
I climb the twisted pyre of future suffering,
knowing now that there is nothing I can purchase
for the comfort of this heart. All its learnings now are silent.
Is it still I who burn beyond recognition?
I will not drag memories inside.
Oh Life, Life: to be outside.
I am in flames. No one who knows me.

Last entry in Rilke's last notebook,

included among his uncollected poems

The Poet's Epitaph

2011-12-29T05:30:00.000+01:00

Rose photo, by Ruth

Rose, oh pure paradox, desire
to be no one's sleep beneath
the many eyelids of your petals.

Uncollected Poems

(Lines composed on October 27, 1925,

with instructions to be carved on his gravestone)

Wheel of God

2011-12-28T05:30:00.001+01:00

Water Wheels of Mill at Gennep

by Vincent van Gogh

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

From The Book of Hours I, 45

Probe the Depths from Which Your Life Springs

2011-12-27T05:30:00.001+01:00

Man Writing Facing Left

by Vincent van Gogh

My only advice for you is this. Go within yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs, and there at its source you'll find the answer to the question of whether you must write. Accept this answer, just as you hear it, without hesitation. It may be revealed that you are called to be an artist. Then take this lot upon you, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without asking for any external reward. For the creative artist must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself—and in nature, to which he is devoted.

Paris, February 17, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

The Double Realm

2011-12-26T05:30:00.002+01:00

Reflections in the Water

by Paul Cézanne

Only he who lifts his lyre
in the Underworld as well
may come back
to praising, endlessly.

Only he who has eaten
the food of the dead
will make music so clear
that even the softest tone is heard.

Though the reflection in the pool
often ripples away,
take the image within you.

Only in the double realm
do our voices carry
all they can say.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 9

Be Comforted and Glad

2011-12-25T05:30:00.000+01:00

Corfu, by George McHenry of Transit Notes

Is there anything that can take from you the hope of being someday in the God you are helping to create in each attentive act of love?

Please celebrate this Christmas with the earnest faith that He may need this very anguish of yours in order to begin. These very days that are such a trial for you may well be the time when everything in you is working at Him, as once you so urgently did as a child. Be patient and without resentment, and know that the least we can do is to make His Becoming no more difficult than Earth makes it for spring when it wants to arrive. Be comforted and glad.

Rome, December 23, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

For the Sake of One Line of Poetry

2011-12-24T10:57:00.000+01:00

Old Woman with a Ball of Yarn

by Marc Chagall

. . . And to think of all these things is still not enough. One must remember many nights of love, of which none was like another. One must remember the cries of women in labor and the pale, distracted sleep of those who have just given birth and begin to close again. But one must also have been with the dying and sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful sounds of life. And it is still not enough to have memories: one must be able to forget them when they crowd the mind and one must have the immense patience to wait until they come again. For it is not the memories themselves. Only when they become our blood, our glance, our gesture, nameless and indistinguishable from who we are only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a poem rises from their midst and goes forth.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Wait and Gather

2011-12-23T05:30:00.006+01:00

Cemetery pebbles and stones in Kraków

photo by Lorenzo of Alchemist's Pillow

(photo cropped by Ruth)

Poems don't come to much when they are written too soon. One should wait and gather the feeling and flavors of a whole life, and a long life if possible, and then, just at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people suppose, emotions—those come easily and quickly enough. They are experiences.

For the sake of one line of poetry, one must see many cities, people, and things. One must be acquainted with animals and feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures of small flowers opening at the first light. One must be able to think back on paths taken through unknown places, on unanticipated meetings, and on farewells one had long seen coming, on days of childhood not yet understood; on parents one disappointed when they offered some pleasure one could not grasp (it was a pleasure suited to another); on childhood illnesses that came on so strangely, altering everything; on days in closed and quiet rooms and on mornings by the sea; on the sea itself, on all seas; on night journeys that rose and flew with the stars....

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

On The Elegies and The Sonnets

2011-12-22T05:30:00.002+01:00

Frigate on the Sea

by Ivan Aivazovsky

The Elegies and The Sonnets support each other reciprocally, and I see it as an endless blessing that I, with the same breath, was able to fill both sails: the small, rust-colored sail of the sonnets and the great white canvas of the Elegies.

Letter to Witold Hulewicz

November 13, 1925

Necessary Experiences

2011-12-21T05:30:00.003+01:00

abstract photo by George McHenry of Transit Notes

Two inner experiences were necessary for the creation of these books (The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies). One is the increasingly conscious decision to hold life open to death. The other is the spiritual imperative to present, in this wider context, the transformations of love that are not possible in a narrower circle where Death is simply excluded as The Other.

Letter to Nanny von Escher

December 22, 1923

Completion

2011-12-20T05:30:00.003+01:00

Chateau de Muzot (c. 1920)

Dear friend, now at last I can breathe. Everything is doable now. For this was huge beyond imagining. In these days and nights I bellowed as I did back then at Duino. But even after that struggle I did not dream that such a storm of heart and spirit could come over me. That I survived it! That I survived it.

Enough. It is here.

I went outside in the cold moonlight and I caressed this little chateau Muzot as though it were a living thing—the old walls that harbored me—just as Duino once did.

Let this be called: The Duino Elegies.

Letter to Anton Kippenberg

February 9, 1922

Piously We Produce

2011-12-19T05:30:00.002+01:00

The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise,

View from the Chevet

by Vincent van Gogh

Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.

And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.

From The Book of Hours I, 4

Autumn's End

2011-12-18T05:30:00.002+01:00

Autumn Landscape at Dusk

by Vincent van Gogh

I have seen for some time
how everything changes.
There is that which arises and acts,
kills and causes grief.

Each time I look at them
the gardens are different—
a slow decay
from gold to brown.
How long for me the way has been.

Now it is empty where I stand
and look down the avenues.
Almost as far as the farthest ocean
I can see the heavy
forbidding sky.

Book of Images

Along with the Laughter

2011-12-17T05:30:00.003+01:00

Lovers in Pink

by Marc Chagall

Lovers.
Awakening desire,
make a place where pain can enter.
That's how we grow.

Along with their laughter,
lovers bring suffering
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger's arms.

From The Book of Hours II, 10

The Ancient One

2011-12-16T10:21:00.000+01:00

Tree Roots

by Ivan Shishkin

At the bottom,
the ancient one,
tangled root of all that has been,
forgotten fountain left unseen.

Helmet's and hunters' horns,
old men muttering,
brothers betrayed,
women played upon.

Branch thrusts upon branch,
nowhere a free one.
Yes, up there! Keep climbing!

See if they'll hold you.
That high one bends already
to become a lyre.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 17

The Capacity to Be Alone

2011-12-15T05:30:00.002+01:00

Girl, by Paul Cézanne

Could there be a solitude that had no value to it? There is only one solitude; it is vast and hard to bear. How often do we gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial and cheap, or trade it for the appearance of agreement, however small, with the first person who comes along. But those may be the very moments when your solitude can grow; its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But don't be confused. All that is needed is the capacity to be alone with yourself, to go into yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you need to achieve. To be alone, the way you were as a child, when the grown-ups walked around so busy and distracted by matters that seemed important because they were beyond your comprehension.

Rome, December 23, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

Echoing the Ocean's Vastness

2011-12-14T05:30:00.001+01:00

View of the Sea from Villerville

by Gustave Caillebotte

The silence must be immense where you are living right now, immense enough to allow such tumult of sound and motion. And if you think that in the ocean's vastness there exists not only the present moment but reverberations of primordial harmonies, then you can be patient and trust the great and indelible solitude at work in you. This will be a nameless influence in all that lies ahead for you to experience and accomplish, rather as if the blood of our ancestors moves in us and combines with ours in the unique, unrepeatable being that at every turn of our life we are.

Paris, December 26, 1908

Letter to a Young Poet

All Will Come Again into Its Strength

2011-12-13T05:30:00.001+01:00

Mont Saint-Victoire, 1867

by Paul Cézanne

All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.

From The Book of Hours II, 25

A Woman Going Blind

2011-12-12T11:51:00.000+01:00

Woman in a Dark Dress

byVincent van Gogh

She sat quite like the others, having tea.
She seemed, I noted, to hold her cup
somewhat differently from the others.
She smiled once. It almost hurt to see.

When everyone stood at the end and moved about,
chatting and laughing, and as it happened,
drifting through the rooms of the house,
I watched her. She followed after,

holding back a little, as if she feared
to draw attention to herself.
On her eyes, bright with happiness,
light shone as on the surface of a pond.

She moved at her own pace and took her time
as though there were something yet to be learned;
some threshold, which once she crossed over,
she would no longer feel her way, but fly.

New Poems

The Sybil

2011-12-11T05:30:00.007+01:00

Marcello's bronze Pythian Sibyl,

larkspur painting by Henri Fantin-Latour

photo by Lorenzo

They called her old even long ago.
But she kept living on, coming down the same street
day after day. They began to reckon
her age in centuries, the way they do with forests.

There she was every evening,
standing in the same place
like the tower of a ruined fortress,
unbent and hollowed out by fire.

Words that, against her will,
swarmed within her,
now fly around her, shrieking,
while others that she still holds back,
lurk in the caverns of her eyes,
waiting for night.

New Poems

The Island of the Sirens

2011-12-10T05:30:00.002+01:00

Ulysses and the Sirens

by John William Waterhouse

When his hosts would ask him late in the evening
to tell of his voyages and the perils they brought,
the words came easily enough,
but he never knew

just how to convey the fear and with what startling
language to let them perceive, as he had,
that distant island turn to gold
across the blue and sudden stillness of the sea.

The sight of it announces a menace
different from the storm and fury
which had always signaled danger.
Silently it casts its spell upon the sailors.

They know that on that golden island
there is sometimes a singing—
and they lean on their oars, like blind men,
as though imprisoned

by the stillness. That quiet contains
all that is. It enters the ear
as if it were the other side
of the singing that no one resists.

New Poems

Were You Not Always Distracted

2011-12-09T05:30:00.002+01:00

Great Egret at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

by George McHenry of Transit Notes

Were you not always distracted by yearning,
as though some lover were about to appear?

Let yourself feel it, that yearning.
It connects you with those
who have sung it through the ages,
sung especially of love unrequited.
Shouldn't this oldest of sufferings
finally bear fruit for us?

From the First Duino Elegy

Like a Flower I Knew

2011-12-08T05:30:00.006+01:00

The Crouching Woman

by Auguste Rodin

It's you, dear Vera, I would remember now,
like a flower I knew before I could name it.
I would show you to the gods,
you vanished one, you unforgotten cry.

Dancer before all else, you hesitated,
paused, as if your youth could be cast in bronze.
Bringing grief and a strange attention,
your music changed the heart.

Then the illness came. Shadows gathered,
a darkness in the blood,
cutting short your springtime.

And, as if your dancing
were a knocking at the door,
it opened, and you entered.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 25

The Life Being Lived

2011-12-07T05:30:00.002+01:00

The Dance by Marc Chagall

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one
who is living life?

The Book of Hours II, 12

Parting

2011-12-06T05:30:00.005+01:00

Orchard in Blossom (Plum Trees)

by Vincent van Gogh

I have felt what it is to part.
I know it still: a dark, invincible
cruel something, which reveals again
the depth of our bond, and tears it in two.

How unguarded I was as I faced it.
I felt you pulling me and letting me go,
while staying behind, merging with all women,
becoming nothing more than this:

a waving hand, no longer intended for me alone;
a waving that continues and grows indistinct.
Perhaps a blossoming plum tree
from which a bird has just taken flight.

New Poems

Both a Breath and a Shout

2011-12-05T05:30:00.005+01:00

orange leaf, by George McHenry of Transit Notes

I want to praise him.
Loud as a trumpet
in the vanguard of an army,
I will run ahead and proclaim.

My words will be sweet to hear.
My people will drink them in like wine
and not get drunk.

And on moonless nights, when few remain
around my tent, I will make music as soft
as a last warm wind that hovers
late and tender before the winter's chill.

So my voice becomes both a breath and a shout.
One prepares the way, the other
surrounds my loneliness with angels.

The Book of Hours III, 11

Two Solitudes Protecting Each Other

2011-12-04T05:30:00.002+01:00

Rilke, by Gerolf Van de Perre

The experience of loving, that now disappoints so many, can actually change and be transformed from the ground up into the building of a relationship between two human beings, not just a man and a woman. And this more authentic love will be evident in the utterly considerate, gentle, and clear manner of its binding and releasing. It will resemble what we now struggle to prepare: the love that consists of two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other.

Rome, May 14, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

For the Animals

2011-12-03T05:30:00.005+01:00

Old Nag, by Vincent van Gogh

For the animals their death
is, as it were, completed.

What's ahead is God.
And when they move,

they move in timelessness,
as fountains do.

From the Eighth Duino Elegy

In Your Sight

2011-12-02T05:30:00.002+01:00

Still Life with Italian Earthenware Jar

by Paul Cézanne

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for when I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.

The Book of Hours I, 13

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

2011-12-01T05:30:00.010+01:00

Statue

by Auguste Rodin

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Photo of Rodin statue found here

The Things I Am

2011-11-30T05:30:00.002+01:00

The Artist's Mother

by Paul Cézanne

I would describe myself
like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I'm coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

From The Book of Hours I, 13

All Creation Holds Its Breath

2011-11-29T05:30:00.007+01:00

Window with View on the Island Bréhat

by Marc Chagall

All creation holds its breath, listening with me,
because, to hear you, I keep silent.

At my senses' horizon
you appear hesitantly,
like scattered islands.

Yet standing here, peering out,
I'm all the time seen by you.

From The Book of Hours I, 18

The Homeless Ones

2011-11-28T11:38:00.000+01:00

A Pair of Shoes, by Vincent van Gogh

There's also this to see: They will live on, they will increase,
no longer pawns of time.
They will grow like the sweet wild berries
the forest ripens as its treasure.

Then blessed are those who never turned away
and blessed are those who stood quietly in the rain.
Theirs shall be the harvest; for them the fruits.

They will outlast the pomp and power,
whose meaning and structures will crumble.
When all else is exhausted and bled of purpose,
they will lift their hands, that have survived.

The Book of Hours III, 28

The Care in a Human Gesture

2011-11-27T05:30:00.009+01:00

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 in this way.
The gods may lean on us more strongly,
but it is their nature."

From the Second Duino Elegy

Greek sculpture found here

Enter Death (II)

2011-11-26T05:30:00.004+01:00

Orpheus and Eurydice

by Auguste Rodin

When you died, there broke across the stage,
through the gash your leaving made,
a shaft of reality: green of real green,
real sunlight, real trees.

Still we keep acting: fearful and solemn,
reciting our script, taking on gestures.
But you, who have been withdrawn from us,
subtracted from our very being,

now and again you overcome us,
showing us the reality we glimpsed,
so that for a while, jolted back, we are life
with no thought of applause.

New Poems

Enter Death (I)

2011-11-25T05:30:00.005+01:00

Orpheus and Eurydice

by Auguste Rodin

We know nothing of this going.
It excludes us. Faced with death,
what cause have we to respond
with the fear and grief or even hatred

that twist the features to a mask of tragedy?
On this side of death we play roles.
So long as we seek to please the audience,
death, who needs no approval, plays us.

New Poems

When Time Stops

2011-11-24T05:30:00.002+01:00

In the Forest of Fontainebleu

by Paul Cézanne

In the fading forest a bird call sounds.
How out of place in a fading forest.
And yet the bird call roundly rests
in this moment that it made,
as wide as the sky above the fading forest.

All things sound together in that cry:
the whole land seems to lie within it,
the great wind seems to rest within it,
and the moment, which wants to persist,
stops, still, as if knowing things
arising from that cry
that you would have to die to know.

Book of Images

Friends

2011-11-23T08:36:00.000+01:00

The Quilting Bee, by Grandma Moses

Friends can only be compared to dance and music. You cannot approach them intentionally, but only out of some involuntary need.

Friends must be the ends and not the means. Otherwise they can get in the way.

Early Journals

Pont du Carousel

2011-11-22T05:30:00.002+01:00

Pont du Carrousel, Afternoon

by Camille Pissaro

The blind man who stands on the bridge
is a milestone marking the edge of the nameless.
He is the unchanging thing
around which the heavens turn,
the motionless midpoint of the stars.
All else is hurry and display.

He is the upright and unmoving one
set down amidst entangled paths.
In a heedless generation
he is a dark doorway to the underworld.

Book of Images

Autumn Tree

2011-11-21T05:30:00.003+01:00

Parsonage Garden at Nuenen with Pond and Figures

by Vincent van Gogh

Oh tall tree of our knowing, shedding its leaves:
It's a matter now of facing the preponderance
of sky appearing through its branches.
Filled by summer, it seemed deep and thick,
filling our minds, too, so comfortably.
Now its whole interior is an avenue of stars.
And the stars do not know us.

Uncollected Poems

Paintings

2011-11-20T05:30:00.003+01:00

Winter Landscape, by Vasily Kandinsky

I am most struck by the small paintings you sent. I experience in them your old form, in miniature, where vast inner space is mirrored, where even winter and snow (and we have our share of both!) bespeak huge distance and wandering, the freshness and joy of pure undiluted youth.

Letters to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy

April 12, 1922

Spectators

2011-11-19T05:30:00.002+01:00

Two Poplars on a Hill

by Vincent van Gogh

And we: always and everywhere spectators,
turned not toward the Open
but to the stuff of our lives.
It downs us. We set it in order.
It falls apart. We order it again
and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this?
Whatever we do, we are in the posture
of one who is about to depart.
Like a person lingering
for a moment on the last hill
where he can see his whole valley—
that is how we live, forever
taking our leave.

From the Eighth Duino Elegy

Lament

2011-11-18T05:30:00.005+01:00

Brooklyn Bridge

by Edward Steichen

How far from us everything is,
and long gone.
I think the star whose light
reaches me now
has been dead for thousands of years.

I think I heard
in the boat that went by
something anxious being said.

In a house, a clock
has struck the hour...
In which house?
I would like to go out from my heart
and stand under the great sky.
I would like to pray.
One of all those stars
must surely still live.

I think I used to know
which star may have kept on shining—
which one, like a white city,
rises still at the far end of its light.

Book of Images

Orpheus, Do You Hear?

2011-11-17T05:30:00.005+01:00

Orpheus, by Auguste Rodin

Orpheus, do you hear
the new sound
droning and roaring?
Many now exult in it.

Though the Machine
insists on our praise,
who can listen
with all this noise?

See, it rolls over everything,
weakening us
and taking our place.

Since its strength is of our making,
why can't it serve
and not possess us?

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 18

Not Caught in the Drama

2011-11-16T05:30:00.003+01:00

Adam and Eve with the Forbidden Fruit

by Marc Chagall

I can still only think of God as the One who allows everything, the One who is not caught up in the whole inexhaustible drama.

Letter to Marianne von Goldschmidt-Rothschild

December 5, 1914

Onto a Vast Plain

2011-11-15T05:30:00.003+01:00

Winter Garden, by Vincent van Gogh

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

From The Book of Hours II, 1

Song of the Drunkard

2011-11-14T10:20:00.000+01:00

The Drunkard, by Marc Chagall

It was not always with me. It would come and go.
I wanted to hold it. The wine held it for me.
What it was, I no longer know.
But I was the one being held, held this way and that,
until I could do nothing else.
I, fool.

Now I am trapped in his game,
dealt out with contempt, to be lost
over and over again to brutish death.
Each time death wins, he uses me,
a filthy card, to scratch his grey scabs,
before tossing me on the dung heap.

Book of Images

Song of the Beggar

2011-11-13T05:30:00.006+01:00

Beggar Man and Beggar Woman

Conversing

by Rembrandt van Rijn

You'll find me in all weathers beyond the gate,
unsheltered from rain and sun.
Every so often I cradle my right ear
in my right hand.
Then my own voice sounds to me
as no one ever hears it.

Then I can't tell for certain
who is screaming:
me or someone else.
Poets cry out for more important matters.

At times I even close my eyes
so my face can disappear.
The way it lies with its full weight in my hands,
it is almost like rest.
Then no one can think I lack a place
to lay my head.

New Poems

The Voices

2011-11-12T05:30:00.002+01:00

Orphan Man in Sunday Clothes

with an Eye Patch

by Vincent van Gogh

The rich and the happy can choose to keep silent,
no need to bid for attention.
But the desperate must reveal themselves,
must say: I am blind
or: I am going blind
or: It's not good for me here on Earth
or: My child is sick
or: I am not holding it together...

But when is that really enough?
So, lest people pass them by like objects,
sometimes they sing.

And sometimes their songs are beautiful.

Book of Images

Three Sprigs of Heather

2011-11-11T05:30:00.004+01:00

Clara Rilke Westhoff

by Paula Modersohn-Becker

Never has heather so touched and even moved me as when I found these three sprigs in your dear letter. Since then they lie in the pages of my Book of Images and permeate them with their strong, serious fragrance which is actually only the scent of autumnal Earth. And how marvelous is this scent. Never, it seems to me, has Earth so let herself be inhaled in one single fragrance. The ripe Earth, in one fragrance that is no less intense than that of the sea: bitter if you could taste it and more like honey if you could hear it. Such depths in it, of darkness, almost of the grave, and yet again wind, tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and destitute like a beggar-monk, while also like the most precious incense, hearty and resinous. And to behold it: these sprigs of heather are like most elegant embroidery—with the violet-hued silk (a violet so moist it could be the sun's complementary color) stitching cypresses in a Persian carpet. You had to have seen that. I think that the little sprigs could not have been so lovely before you put them in your letter. You must have told them something amazing.

Letter to Clara Westhoff Rilke

September 13, 1907

Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom (II)

2011-11-10T05:30:00.012+01:00

Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom

Oh the losses in the universe, Marina, the perishing stars!
We don't increase their number when we plunge.
In the All, everything has long been counted.
Our own falling does not diminish the sacred number.
Accepting this, we fall to the Source and heal...

Waves, Marina, we are the ocean! Depths, Marina, we are the sky!
Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times spring.
We are larks whose outbursts of song
fling them to the heavens.

Uncollected Poems

Quatrain sent by Rilke to Marina Tsvetayeva

with a copy of his Duino Elegies, May 3, 1926

Arriving at Rodin's Place in Meudon

2011-11-09T05:30:00.002+01:00

Rilke and Auguste Rodin
photographer unknown

He has received me, but that means nothing until I tell you how. Thus: the way a beloved place receives you on your return through many tangled trails. A spring which you sang and lived for day and night while you were gone. A grove over whose leafy canopies the birds cast shadows as they fly back and forth. A path along the roses that never ceased to lead you where you needed to go. And like a great dog did he receive me, recognizing me with peaceable, caressing eyes. And like an eastern god, moving only from within his noble calm, and with the smiles of a woman and the eager hands of a child. And he led me around to see the gardens and houses and studios.

Letter to Clara Westhoff Rilke

September 15, 1905

Night

2011-11-08T05:30:00.001+01:00

The Street Performers in the Night

by Marc Chagall

Night. You with your depth-dissolving face
pressed against my face.
You, counterbalance
to my awestruck gaze.

Night, shuddering in my regard,
but in yourself so steady;
inexhaustible creation, enduring beyond
the fate of earth;

brimming with new stars, who fling
fire from their birth
into the soundless adventure
of galactic spaces:

your sheer existence,
you transcender of all things, makes me so small.
Yet, one with the darkening earth,
I dare to be in you.

Uncollected Poems

Only Love Can Grasp Them

2011-11-07T05:30:00.010+01:00

The Tree of Life, Soclet Frieze

by Gustav Klimt

Works of art belong immeasurably to themselves, and are accessible least of all to criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and respond to them fairly. Always trust your own feeling, rather than others' discussions, interpretations and arguments. Should you be mistaken, then slowly and with time the natural growth of your inner life will bring you to fuller awareness.

Viareggio, April 23, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

Jeremiah

2011-11-06T05:30:00.002+01:00

Rilke during WWI, in Austrian military uniform

photo found here

Once I was as yielding as early wheat,
but it pleased you, raging one,
to ignite the heart I offered you.
Now, like a lion's, it is on fire.

What sort of mouth did you allot me,
back then when I arrived?
It was like a wound, which now is bleeding
one catastrophe after another.

Daily I resound with fresh horrors
that you, insatiable one, contrive,
and they do not destroy my mouth.
Even you lack the power to silence it now,

when those whom my people have crushed and scattered are finally lost.
Amidst the rubble, I would want
to keep on hearing the voice that has been mine,
from the beginning a howl.

New Poems

God Is Ripening

2011-11-05T05:30:00.002+01:00

Meadow in the Mountains

by Vincent van Gogh

When gold is in the mountain
and we've ravaged the depths
till we've given up digging,

it will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.

Even when we don't desire it,
God is ripening.

The Book of Hours I, 16

Offering What We Are

2011-11-04T05:30:00.003+01:00

Red Vineyards at Arles

by Vincent van Gogh

Oh, the places we would pour ourselves over,
pushing into the meager surfaces
all the impulses of our heart, our desire, our need.
To whom in the end do we offer ourselves?

To the stranger, who misunderstands us,
to the other, whom we never found,
to the servant, who could not free us,
to the winds of spring, which we could not hold,
and to silence, so easy to lose.

Uncollected Poems

Mohammed's Calling

2011-11-03T05:30:00.002+01:00

Angel with a Sword

by Marc Chagall

When into the hidden cave the angel stepped—
he was unmistakable, so towering and radiant—
the lone man there shed all claims
and asked only to be permitted
to remain the simple man he was,
a merchant confused by his travels.
He could not read—and now a word like this
was too much for even a wise one.

But the angel, imperious, pointed over and over
to what was written on the page he held,
and would not yield and kept insisting: read.

Then the man read, and when he did the angel bowed.
It was as if he had always been reading,
and now was able to obey and bring to pass.

New Poems

What I Want

2011-11-02T05:30:00.002+01:00

Rocks at L'Estaque, by Paul Cézanne

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

The Book of Hours I, 14

Between the Stars

2011-11-01T05:30:00.003+01:00

Bloaters on a Yellow Piece of Paper

by Vincent van Gogh

How far it is between the stars, how much farther
is what's right here. The distance, for example,
between a child and one who walks by—
oh, how inconceivably far.

Not only in measurable spans does Fate
move through our lives.
Think how great the distance between a young girl
and the boy she avoids and loves.

Everything is far, nowhere does the circle close.
See, on the plate upon the festive table
how strangely the fish is staring.

Fish are mute, we used to think. Who knows?
We may, in the end, find that their silence
says more to us than our words.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 10

Endlessly Offered into Life

2011-10-31T05:30:00.005+01:00

L'homme qui marche, by Auguste Rodin

photo by Adam Rzepka

Oh, the pleasure of it, always emerging new
from the loosened clay. Those who dared to come first
had hardly any help. Nevertheless cities arose
on sun-favored coasts, and pitchers filled with water and oil.

Gods: we picture them first in wild brushstrokes
which petty Fate keeps wiping away.
But gods don't die. Let us listen to them:
they will be there to hear us at the end.

We are one generation through thousands of years,
mothers and fathers shaped by children to come,
who, in their turn, will overtake them.

We are endlessly offered into life: all time is ours.
And what any one of us might be worth,
death alone knows—and does not tell.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 24

Our Invisible Property

2011-10-30T05:30:00.003+01:00

A Painter at Work, by Paul Cézanne

The experience and inclination and affection we put into familiar things cannot be replaced. We are perhaps the last who still will have known such things. On us is the responsibility not only to remember them, but to know their value.

The earth has no other recourse but to become invisible in us, who belong in part to what is invisible; and our own invisible property can increase during our span here.

Letter to Witold Hulewicz

November 13, 1925

To Meet and Be Met

2011-10-29T05:30:00.002+02:00

study of an apple, by Paul Cézanne

I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to the world.

I know nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

From The Book of Hours I, 1

Valais

2011-10-28T05:30:00.003+02:00

Riffel Lake and Monte Rosa, Valais

between ca 1890 and ca 1900

photo: Wiki Commons

Now, the landscape of this region called Valais is indescribable. Why isn't it named when people count up the wonders of the world? At first I did not really see it, because I was comparing it in my mind with the most meaningful of my memories: with Spain, with Provence (to which, in reality, thanks to the Rhone, it is a blood relative). But now that I have learned to behold it fully on its own terms, it reveals its true dimensions to me, and I come more and more to recognize the sweetness of its character and sense the most urgent of its messages... Perhaps that is reflected in a strange, inexpressible fear that I might die somewhere else before I have grasped this and taken it into myself.

Early Journals

Too Vast to Be Contained

2011-10-27T05:30:00.002+02:00

title page angel

by Marc Chagall

We may yearn to come to rest
in some small piece of pure humanity,
a strip of orchard between river and rock.
But our 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.

From the Second Duino Elegy

Bell

2011-10-26T05:30:00.003+02:00

Forest, by Paul Cézanne

Sound, no longer defined
by our hearing. As though the tone
that encircles us
were space itself expanding.

Uncollected Poems

The Moon

2011-10-25T05:30:00.004+02:00

Bouquet with Full Moon

by Marc Chagall

The way that body, the moon, sublime, purposeful,
suddenly steps out over the peak,
bringing the night to serene completion.
Just so my voice rises purely
over the mountains of No More.
And the astonished places you inhabited and left
ache more clearly for you.

Uncollected Poems

Here Is the Time for Telling

2011-10-24T05:30:00.002+02:00

A Modern Olympia

by Paul Cézanne

Here is the time for telling. Here is its home.
Speak and make known: More and more
the things we could experience
are lost to us, banished by our failure
to imagine them.
Old definitions, which once
set limits to our living,
break apart like dried crusts.

From the Ninth Duino Elegy

Autumn

2011-10-23T05:30:00.002+02:00

The Walk: Falling Leaves

by Vincent van Gogh

Leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,
as if, far off in the heavens, gardens were wilting.
And as they fall, their gestures say "it's over."

In the night the heavy Earth is falling
from out of all the stars into loneliness.

We all are falling. This hand here is falling.
Just look: it is in all of us.

Yet there is one who holds this falling
with infinite tenderness in her hands.

Book of Images

To Give Ourselves Fully

2011-10-22T05:30:00.004+02:00

Chestnut Trees in Blossom

by Vincent van Gogh

We do not have to build a church. Let us be complete in ourselves. Let us drink ourselves empty, give ourselves fully, extend ourselves outward—until, at last, the waving treetops are our own gestures and our laughter is resurrected in the children who play beneath them...

Early Journals

The Depths of His Own Being

2011-10-21T05:30:00.007+02:00

A blue cow

by Marc Chagall

Only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another as something alive and will sound the depths of his own being.

Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

The Machine

2011-10-20T05:30:00.003+02:00

Sale of Building Scrap

by Vincent van Gogh

The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build the house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver's hand takes too long to feel its way.

The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it's alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.

But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that—when you feel it—brings you to your knees.

There are yet words that come near to the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 10

Afterlife

2011-10-19T05:30:00.004+02:00

Landscape with Trees

by Vincent van Gogh

I don't care for the Christian concept of an afterlife. I distance myself from it ever more, without of course taking the trouble to attack it. It may have its value, alongside so many other metaphysical hypotheses. But for me the danger is that it not only renders what is mortal more vague and inaccessible, but also—because of our longing for the Beyond—it makes us less present and earthy. As long as we are here, and cousin to tree, flower, soil, may all that is near at hand be real to us and enter fully our awareness.

Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Cruoy

On Security

2011-10-18T05:30:00.003+02:00

Sketch, by Auguste Rodin

Outside of poetry and art, security is only and ever achieved at the cost of the most inescapable limitation. This diminishment consists of choosing to be satisfied and pleasured by a world where everything is known and where preoccupation with self is both possible and useful. But how could we want that? Our security must become a relationship to the whole, omitting nothing.

Letter to Ilse Erdman

October 9, 1916

The Work Being Accomplished Within You

2011-10-17T05:30:00.003+02:00

Portrait of Armand Roulin

by Vincent van Gogh

So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?

Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904

Letters to a Young Poet

In a Foreign Park

2011-10-16T05:30:00.003+02:00

Memories of the Garden at Etten

(or Ladies of Arles)

by Vincent van Gogh

Two paths appear. They open to no one.
But sometimes, as you face them,
one allows you to proceed.
Then you think you've lost your way,
but suddenly there you are in that inner garden,
left alone again with the carved stone

and reading it again:
Baroness Britta Sophie—and once again
tracing with your finger
the time-worn number of the year.
Why does this discovery never grow faint?

What makes you stop here
just the way you did before,
as though you expected something
in this damp, untrodden place
shadowed by elms?

New Poems

Leaving Paradise

2011-10-15T05:30:00.005+02:00

Winding Road in Provence

by Paul Cézanne

Be our refuge from the wrath
that drove us out of Paradise.

Be our shepherd, but never call us—
we can't bear to know what's ahead.

From The Book of Hours I, 44

The Open

2011-10-14T05:30:00.006+02:00

Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Gardanne

by Paul Cézanne

With their whole gaze
animals behold the Open.
Only our eyes
are as though reversed
and set like traps around us,
keeping us inside.
That there is something out there
we know only from the creatures' countenance.

We turn even the young child around,
making her look backward
at the forms we create,
not outward into the Open.

From the Eighth Duino Elegy

The Mercy We Long For

2011-10-13T05:30:00.008+02:00

Seaside at Saint Maries, by Vincent van Gogh

Don't boast, you judges, that you no longer torture
or clamp an iron collar 'round the neck.
Though the mercy we long for
may rearrange your features

and the scaffold fall into disuse
like an outgrown toy,
no one is better off.
The god of true mercy would step differently

into the undefended heart.
He would enter with radiance
the way gods do, strong as the sea wind

for treasure-bearing ships, and claim us lightly
as the child of an infinite union
absorbed in play.

Sonnet to Orpheus II, 9

When I Go Toward You

2011-10-12T03:05:00.001+02:00

Apothecary at Vitebsk, by Marc Chagall

I don't want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its sources.

When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.

From The Book of Hours I, 53

Portrait of My Father as a Young Man

2011-10-11T05:30:00.006+02:00

In the eyes, dream. The brow bearing witness
to something far off. About the mouth,
abundant youth, an unsmiling seductiveness.
And across the ornamental braiding
of the slender, elite uniform,
the saber's hilt and both hands
waiting quietly, driven toward nothing.
Now they are barely visible, as if they,
reaching for the Distant, were the first to disappear.
All else is veiled in its own mystery,
dissolved in its own depths.

You swiftly fading daguerreotype
in my more slowly fading hands.

New Poems

Our Oldest Friends

2011-10-10T05:30:00.010+02:00

Myth of Orpheus

by Marc Chagall

Our oldest friends—the great gods
who never tried to woo us—
shall we reject them because our tools of steel
do not need them? Or shall we seek them on a map?

Those powerful friends, who receive our dead,
play no part in our wheels and gears.
We have moved our banquets far from them,
and pass their messengers with such speed

we can't hear what they say. Lonelier now,
having no one but each other, not knowing each other,
we no longer meander on curving paths, but race straight ahead.

Only in the mills do the once sacred fires still burn,
lifting ever heavier hammers, while we
diminish in strength, like swimmers at sea.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 24

We Stand in Your Garden

2011-10-09T05:30:00.003+02:00

Bend in the Forest Road

by Paul Cézanne

Lord, we are more wretched than the animals
who do their deaths once and for all,
for we are never finished with our not dying.

Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

We stand in your garden year after year.
We are trees for yielding a sweet death.
But fearful, we wither before the harvest.

The Book of Hours III; 8

As If God Had Been Lost

2011-10-08T05:30:00.006+02:00

The Creation of Man

by Marc Chagall

Ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, if you really have lost God. Is it not rather the case that you have never yet possessed him? When would that have taken place? ...Do you imagine that someone who really had him could lose him like a little stone, or that one who possessed him could ever be lost by him? And if you are terrified that he does not exist, at this very moment we speak of him, what reason do you, if he never existed, for missing him and seeking him as if he had been lost?

Rome, December 23, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

Train Yourself to This

2011-10-07T05:30:00.006+02:00

The Creation of Man, by Marc Chagall

You carry within you the capacity to imagine and give shape to your world. It is a pure and blessed way of living. Train yourself to this, but also trust whatever comes. If it comes from your desire, from some inner need, accept that and hate nothing.

Worpswede, July 16, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

Every Turning

2011-10-06T05:30:00.003+02:00

Chartres Cathedral

by Camille Corot

Every turning of the world
knows some who are disinherited, to whom
neither the past nor the future belongs.
Even what is about to happen is still remote to them.

We should not be confused by this, but strengthened in our resolve
to preserve the still-recognizable forms.
In the middle of history, amidst all that annihilates
and the not-knowing whither, they stood
as if they had a right to be there,
under the stars of the constant heavens.

From the Seventh Duino Elegy

Il Poverello

2011-10-05T05:30:00.010+02:00

St. Francis

Piero della Francesca

Where is he now, who leaving wealth behind
grew so bold in poverty
that he threw off his clothes before the bishop
and stood naked in the square?

The most inward and loving of all,
he came forth like a new beginning,
the brown-robed brother of your nightingales,
with his wonder and good will
and delight in Earth.

The Book of Hours III, 33

Saint Francis of Assisi

2011-10-04T05:30:00.012+02:00

Still Life with Three Birds Nests
by Vincent van Gogh

Where is he, the clear one
whose song has died away?
Do the poor, who can only wait,
feel that young and joyous one among them?

Does he rise for them, perhaps at nightfall—
poverty's evening star?

The Book of Hours III, 34

Premonition

2011-10-03T05:30:00.005+02:00

A Wheatfield with Cypresses

by Vincent van Gogh

Like a flag, I am surrounded by distances.
I sense the winds that are coming
and must live them
while the things below do not yet stir.
Doors still close gently
and windows don't shake.
Ashes lie heavy on the hearth.

But I know about gales
and I shudder like the sea.
I unfurl myself and fold in again
and flail back and forth,
all alone in the great storm.

Book of Images

A New Morning

2011-10-02T05:30:00.007+02:00

Apples with napkin, by Paul Cézanne

And today, once again, a new morning: bright, with close, rounded clouds that frame expanses of the immeasurably deep sky. Agitation in the treetops. In everything else, restfulness. Windfall of apples. The grass softly invites you to walk out of the house. The dimness inside is alive with lights on antique silver, and their reflections in the looking glass confuse the eye as to what is enclosed within the mirror's frame.

There are so many days here, none like any other. And beneath all their differences is this great similarity: the gratitude in which they are received.

Early Journals

Autumn Day

2011-10-01T05:30:00.003+02:00

Autumn

by Paul Cézanne

Lord, the time has come. Summer was abundant.
Cast your shadows over the sundial,
across the fields unleash your winds.

Command the final fruits to ripen.
Grant them two more southern days,
bring them to fullness and press
their last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who now has no house will not build one.
Who now is alone will remain alone,
will read into the night, write long letters,
and, restless, wander streets
where leaves are blowing.

Book of Images

No Miracles, Please

2011-09-30T05:30:00.005+02:00

Avenue of Poplars in Autumn

by Vincent van Gogh

I would rather sense you
as the earth senses you.
In my ripening
ripens
what you are.

No miracles, please.
Just let your laws
become clearer
from generation to generation.

From The Book of Hours II, 15

Where Does a Smile Go

2011-09-29T05:30:00.035+02:00

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?

From the Second Duino Elegy

Original photography and music from marieancolie:

In Rome

2011-09-28T05:30:00.005+02:00

Clara and Rainer Maria Rilke

in Rome

There is much beauty here, for great beauty is everywhere. Living waters flow endlessly through ancient aqueducts into the great city, and dance in many piazzas over white stone basins and spread out in spacious pools, murmuring by day and lifting their murmur into the starry, wind-softened night. There are gardens here, unforgettable boulevards, and stairs—stairs designed by Michelangelo, stairs inspired by downward flowing water—step flowing into widening step like wave into wave. From such impressions you gather yourself, you win yourself back from the clamoring multiplicity, and slowly learn to know a very few things in which the eternal is reflected, which you love and in which your solitude allows you to take part.

Rome, October 29, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

The Books You Love

2011-09-27T05:30:00.003+02:00

The Novel Reader, by Vincent van Gogh

Live for awhile in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books—of this I am certain—will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.

Viareggio, April 5, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

The Violin I Keep Hearing

2011-09-26T05:30:00.005+02:00

Blue Violin, by Marc Chagall

Strange violin, are you following me?
In how many far-off cities
has your lonely night spoken to mine?
Are hundreds playing you, or only one?

Are there, in all the great cities,
those who, without you,
would be lost in the rivers?
And why am I ever the one to hear you?

Why am I always the neighbor
to those troubled ones who force you to sing?
And to say life is harder
than the hardest of things?

Book of Images

My Own Deep Soul

2011-09-25T05:30:00.005+02:00

Leo Tolstoy, by Leonid Pasternak

You, my own deep soul,
trust me. I will not betray you.
My blood is alive with many voices
telling me I am made of longing.

What mystery breaks over me now?
In its shadow I come into life.
For the first time I am alone with you—

you, my power to feel.

From The Book of Hours I, 39

Angels

2011-09-24T05:30:00.003+02:00

Abraham and the Three Angels

by Marc Chagall

They all have tired mouths
and bright, seamless souls.
And a yearning, as for sin,
drifts at times through their dreams.

They mostly resemble each other.
In the garden of God they are silent,
like rest-notes
in his music and his might.

Only when they spread their wings,
do they stir the air—
as if God with wide sculptor's hands
were turning pages
in the hidden book of first things.

Book of Images