Year: 2010

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The sovereigns of the world are old

The sovereigns of the world are old
and they will have no heirs at all.
Death took their sons when they were small,
and their pale daughters soon resigned
to force frail crowns they could not hold.
The mob breaks these to bits of gold
that the world’s master, shrewd and bold,
melts in the fire to enginery
that sullenly serves his desires,
but fortune is not in his hire.
The ore is homesick. It is eager
to leave the coins and turning wheels
that offer it a life so meagre.
From coffers and from factories
it would flow back into the veins
of gaping mountains whence it came,
that close upon it once again.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

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The last house of this village stands

The last house of this village stands
as alone as if it were the last house in the world.

The road, that the little village cannot hold,
moves on slowly out into the night.

The little village is but a place of transition,
expectant and afraid, between two distances,
a passageway along houses instead of a bridge.

And those who leave the village may wander
a long time, and many may die, perhaps, along the way.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours

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It’s possible I’m moving through the hard veins

It’s possible I’m moving through the hard veins
of heavy mountains, like the ore does, alone;
I’m already so deep inside, I see no end in sight,
and no distance: everything is getting near
and everything getting near is turning to stone.

I still can’t see very far yet into suffering,—
so this vast darkness makes me small;
are you the one: make yourself powerful, break in:
so that your whole being may happen to me,
and to you may happen, my whole cry.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours

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I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,
and never to be too blind or too old
to hold your heavy, swaying image.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere do I want to remain folded,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am lie.
And I want my meaning
true for you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use every day ,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the deadliest storm of all.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours

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I live my life in growing rings

I live my life in growing rings
which move out over the things around me.
Perhaps I’ll never complete the last,
but that’s what I mean to try.

I’m circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I’ve been circling thousands years;
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours

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You are the future, the great sunrise red

You are the future, the great sunrise red
above the broad plains of eternity.
You are the cock-crow when time’s night has fled,
You are the dew, the matins, and the maid,
the stranger and the mother, you are death.

You are the changeful shape that out of Fate
rears up in everlasting solitude,
the unlamented and the unacclaimed,
beyond describing as some savage wood.

You are the deep epitome of things
that keeps its being’s secret with locked lip,
and shows itself to others otherwise:
to the ship, a haven — to the land, a ship.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

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Although, as from a prison walled with hate,

Although, as from a prison walled with hate,
each from his own self labors to be free,
the world yet holds a wonder, and how great!
ALL LIFE IS LIVED: now this comes home to me.
But who, then, lives it? Things that patiently
stand there, like some unfingered melody
that sleeps within a harp as day is going?
Is it the winds, across the waters blowing,
is it the branches, beckoning each to each,
is it the flowers, weaving fragrances,
the aging alleys that reach out endlessly?
Is it the warm beasts, moving to and fro,
is it the birds, strange as they sail from view?
This life — who really lives it? God, do you?

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

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Lifting My Eyes

Lifting my eyes from the book, from the tightly sequenced lines
to the full and perfect night:
Oh how like the stars my buried feelings break free,
as if a bouquet of wildflowers
had come untied:

The upswing of the light ones, the bowing sway of the heavy ones
and the delicate ones’ timid curve.
Everywhere joy in relation and nowhere grasping;
world in abundance and earth enough.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

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and we streak out of our bodies across the sky

Someone touches his shoulder. Ali is looking into the dim light of early dawn.
……… “What is it?”
……… “Patrol, I think”
……… We are out of the reservation area and the penalty for being caught here without authorization is the white-hot jockstrap. We will not be taken alive. We have cyanide shoes, a cushion of compressed gas in a double soul under our feet. A certain sequence of toe movements and we settle down in a woosh of cyanide as the Green Guards clutch their blue throats and we streak out of our bodies across the sky. We also have rocket-fuel flamethrowers, very effective at close range.
……… This is not a patrol. It is a gang of naked boys covered with erogenous sores. As they walk they giggle and stroke and scratch each other. From time to time they fuck each other in Hula-Hoops to idiot mambo.
……… “Just leper kids,” Ali grunts. “Let’s make some java.”
……… We drink it black in tin cups and wash down K rations.

— William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night

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I Choose to Begin

I love all beginnings, despite their anxiousness and their uncertainty, which belong to every commencement. If I have earned a pleasure or a reward, or if I wish that something had not happened; if I doubt the worth of an experience and remain in my past — then I choose to begin at this very second.

Begin what? I begin. I have already thus begun a thousand lives.

— Rilke, Early Journals

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For a long time I would go to bed early

For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I not have time to tell myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, but even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, something dark indeed.

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

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Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;
slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
and without any feet can go to you;
and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
and if you set this brain of mine afire,
upon my blood I then will carry you.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

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The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face

The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face
of all things becomes radiant and vain;
only at dusk do they find you again.
The twilight hour, the tenderness of space,
lays on a thousand heads a thousand hands,
and strangeness grows devout where they have lain.

With this gentlest of gestures you would hold
the world, thus only and not otherwise.
You lean from out its skies to capture earth,
and feel it underneath your mantle’s folds.

You have so mild a way of being.
……………………………………………They
who name you loudly when they come to pray
forget your nearness. From your hands that tower
above us, mountainously, lo, there soars,
to give the law whereby our senses live,
dark-browed, your wordless power.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours