What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your pitcher, broken, lie?
When I, your drink, go stale or dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
you lose your meaning, losing me.

Homeless without me, you will be
robbed of your welcome, warm and sweet.
I am your sandals: your tired feet
will wander bare for want of me.

Your mighty cloak will fall away.
Your glance that on my cheek was laid
and pillowed warm, will seek, dismayed,
the comforts that I offered once —
to lie, as sunset colors fade
in the cold lap of alien stones.

What will you do, God? I am afraid.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

We are all workmen: prentice, journeyman,
or master, building you — you towering nave.
And sometimes there will come to us a grave
wayfarer, who like radiance thrills
the souls of all our hundred artisans,
trembling as he shows us a new skill.

We climb upon the rocking scaffolding,
the hammers in our hands swing heavily,
until our foreheads feel the caressing wing
of a radiant hour that knows everything,
and hails from you as wind hails from the sea.

Then hammerstrokes sound, multitudinous,
and through the mountains echoes blast on blast.
Only at dusk we yield you up at last:
and slowly your shaping contours dawn on us.

God, you are vast.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

In all these things I cherish as a brother
still it is you I find; seedlike you wait,
basking serenely in the narrowest compass,
and greatly give yourself in what is great.

This is the marvel of the play of forces,
that they so serve the things wherethrough they flow:
growing in roots, to dwindle in the tree-trunks,
and in the crowns like resurrection show.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

If I had grown up in a land where days
were free from care and hours were delicate,
then I would have contrived a splendid fête
for you, and not have held you in the way
I sometimes do, tightly in fearful hands.

There I would have been bold to squander you,
you boundless Presence.
Like a ball
I would have flung you among all tossing joys,
so one might catch you,
and if you seemed to fall,
with both hands high would spring
toward you,
you thing of things.

I would have let you flash
forth like a sword.
From the most golden of all rings
I would have taken your fire and
reset it in a mounting that would hold it
over the whitest hand.

I would have painted you: not on the wall,
but upon very heaven from verge to verge,
and would have shaped you, as a giant would:
you, as a mountain, as a blazing fire,
as the simoon, grown from the desert’s surge —
or
it may be, in very truth, I found
you once . . .
………………..My friends are far away,
I scarcely hear their laughter any more;
and you: ah, you have fallen from the nest,
a fledgling, yellow-clawed with big eyes:
I grieve for you.
(In my broad hand your tininess is lost).
And from the well I lift a drop
upon my finger, intent if you’ll stretch
a thirsty throat for it, and then I hear
your heart and mine beating,
and both with fear.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

No, my life is not this precipitous hour
through which you see me passing at a run.
I stand before my background like a tree.
Of all my many mouths I am but one,
and that which soonest chooses to be dumb.

I am the rest between two notes
which, struck together, sound discordantly,
because death’s note would claim a higher key.

But in the dark pause, trembling, the notes meet,
harmonious.

………………… And the song continues sweet.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

I am, you anxious one. Do you not hear me
rush to claim you with each eager sense?
Now my feelings have found wings, and, circling,
whitely fly about your countenance.
Here my spirit in its dress of stillness
stands before you, — oh, do you not see?
In your glance does not my Maytime prayer
grow to ripeness as upon a tree?

Dreamer, it is I who am your dream.
But would you awake, I am your will,
and master of all splendor, and I grow
to a sphere, like stars poised high and still,
with time’s singular city stretched below.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

I read it in your word, and learn it from
the history of the gestures of your warm
wise hands, rounding themselves to form
and circumscribe the shapes that are to come.
Aloud you said: to live, and lo: to die,
and you repeated, tirelessly: to be.
And yet there was no death till murder came.
Then through your perfect circles ran a rent
and a cry tore,
scattering the voices that not long before
had gently blent
to utter you,
to carry you,
bridge across the abyss —

And what they since have stammered
are the fragments only
of your old name.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

If only there were stillness, full, complete.
If all the random and approximate
were muted, with neighbors’ laughter, for your sake,
and if the clamor that my senses make
did not confound the vigil I would keep —

Then in a thousandfold thought I could think
you out, even to your utmost brink,
and (while a smile endures) possess you, giving
you away, as though I were but giving thanks,
to all the living.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

You, neighbor god, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so
only because I seldom hear you breathe
and know: you are alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down,
and that without a sound.

The wall is builded of your images.

They stand before you hiding you like names.
And when the light within me blazes high
that in my inmost soul I know you by,
the radiance is squandered on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

Now the hour bows down, it touches me, throbs
metallic, lucid and bold:
my senses are trembling. I feel my own power —
on the plastic day I lay hold.

Until I perceived it, no thing was complete,
but waited, hushed, unfulfilled.
My vision is ripe, to each glance like a bride
comes softly the thing that was willed.

There is nothing too small, but my tenderness paints
it large on a background of gold,
and I prize it, not knowing whose soul at the sight,
released, may unfold . . .

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

In the second version, Persephone
is dead. She dies, her mother grieves —
problems of sexuality need not
trouble us here.

Compulsively, in grief, Demeter
circles the earth. We don’t expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.

We have here
a mother and a cipher: this is
accurate to the experience
of the mother as

she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks:
I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant
is puzzled; later, the child’s opinion is
she has always existed, just as

her mother has always existed
in her present form. Her mother
is like a figure at a bus stop,
an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that,
she was the bus, a temporary
home or convenience. Persephone, protected,
stares out the window of the chariot.

What does she see? A morning
in early spring, in April. Now

her whole life is beginning — unfortunately,
it’s going to be
a short life. She’s going to know, really,

only two adults: death and her mother.
But two is
twice what her mother has:
her mother has

one child, a daughter.
As a god, she could have had
a thousand children.

We begin to see here
the deep violence of the earth

whose hostility suggests
she has no wish
to continue as a source of life.

And why is this hypothesis
never discussed? Because
it is not in the story; it only
creates the story.

In grief, after the daughter dies,
the mother wanders the earth.
She is preparing her case;
like a politician
she remembers everything and admits
nothing.

For example, her daughter’s
birth was unbearable, her beauty
was unbearable: she remembers this.
She remembers Persephone’s
innocence, her tenderness —

What is she planning, seeking her daughter?
She is issuing
a warning whose implicit message is:
what are you doing outside my body?

You ask yourself:
why is the mother’s body safe?

The answer is
this is the wrong question, since

the daughter’s body
doesn’t exist, except
as a branch of the mother’s body
that needs to be
reattached at any cost.

When a god grieves it means
destroying others (as in war)
while at the same time petitioning
to reverse agreements (as in war also):

if Zeus will get her back,
winter will end.

Winter will end, spring will return.
The small pestering breezes
that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers —

Spring will return, a dream
based on a falsehood:
that the dead return.

Persephone
was used to death. Now over and over
her mother hauls her out again —

You must ask yourself:
are the flowers real? If

Persephone “returns” there will be
one of two reasons:

either she was not dead or
she is being used
to support a fiction —

I think I can remember
being dead. Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
how can I endure the earth?

And he would say,
in a short time you will be here again.
And in the time between

you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.

[From Averno]

1.

You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on —
something you have no choice about.

When I tell this to my children
they pay no attention.
The old people, they think —
this is what they always do:
talk about things no one can see
to cover up all the brain cells they’re losing.
They wink at each other;
listen to the old one, talking about the spirit
because he can’t remember anymore the word for chair.

It is terrible to be alone.
I don’t mean to live alone —
to be alone, where no one hears you.

I remember the word for chair.
I want to say — I’m just not interested anymore.

I wake up thinking
you have to prepare.
Soon the spirit will give up —
all the chairs in the world won’t help you.

I know what they say when I’m out of the room.
Should I be seeing someone, should I be taking
one of the new drugs for depression.
I can hear them, in whispers, planning how to divide the cost.

And I want to scream out
you’re all of you living in a dream.

Bad enough, they think, to watch me fall apart.
Bad enough without this lecturing they get these days
as though I had any right to this new information.

Well, they have the same right.

They’re living in a dream, and I’m preparing
to be a ghost. I want to shout out

the mist has cleared —
It’s like some new life:
you have no stake in the outcome;
you know the outcome.

Think of it: sixty years sitting in chairs. And now the mortal spirit
seeking so openly, so fearlessly —

To raise the veil.
To see what you’re saying goodbye to.
.
2.

I didn’t go back for a long time.
When I saw the field again, autumn was finished.
Here, it finishes almost before it starts —
the old people don’t even own summer clothing.

The field was covered with snow, immaculate.
There wasn’t a sign of what happened here.
You didn’t know whether the farmer
had replanted or not.
Maybe he gave up and moved away.

The police didn’t catch the girl.
After awhile they said she moved to some other country,
one where  they don’t have fields.

A disaster like this
leaves no mark on the earth.
And people like that — they think it gives them
a fresh start.

I stood a long time, staring at nothing.
After a bit, I noticed how dark it was, how cold.

A long time — I have no idea how long.
Once the earth decides to have no memory
time seems in a way meaningless.

But not to my children. They’re after me
to make a will; they’re worried the government
will take everything.

They should come with me sometime
to look at this field under the cover of snow.
The whole thing is written out there.

Nothing: I have nothing to give them.

That’s the first.
The second is: I don’t want to be burned.
.
3.

On one side, the soul wanders.
On the other, human beings living in fear.
In between, the pit of disappearance.

Some young girls ask me
if they’ll be safe near Averno —
they’re cold, they want to go south a little while.
And one says, like a joke, but not too far south —

I say, as safe as anywhere,
which makes them happy.
What it means is nothing is safe.

You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl
from which you never return.

Like the field, the one that burned.
Afterward, the girl was gone.
Maybe she didn’t exist,
we have no proof either way.

All we know is:
the field burned.
But we saw that.

So we have to believe in the girl,
in what she did. Otherwise
it’s just forces we don’t understand
ruling the earth.

The girls are happy, thinking of their vacation.
Don’t take a train, I say.

They write their names in mist on a train window.
I want to say, you’re good girls,
trying to leave your names behind.
.
4.

We spent the whole day
sailing the archipelago,
the tiny islands that were
part of the penisula

until they’d broken off
into the fragments you see now
floating in the northern sea water.

They seemed safe to me,
I think because no one can live there.

Later we sat in the kitchen
watching the evening start and then the snow.
First one, then the other.

We grew silent, hypnotized by the snow
as though a kind of tubulence
that had been hidden before
was becoming visible,

something within the night
exposed now —

In our silence, we were asking
those questions friends who trust each other
ask out of great fatigue,
each one hoping the other knows more

and when this isn’t so, hoping
their shared impressions will amount to insight.

Is there any benefit in forcing upon oneself
the realization that one must die?
Is it possible to miss the opportunity of one’s life?

Questions like that.

The snow was heavy. The black night
transformed into busy white air.

Something we hadn’t seen revealed.
Only the meaning wasn’t revealed.
.
5.

After the first winter, the field began to grow again.
But there were no more orderly furrows.
The smell of the wheat persisted, a kind of random aroma
intermixed with various weeds, for which
no human use has been as yet devised.

It was puzzling —  no one knew
where the farmer had gone.
Some people thought he died.
Someone said he had a daughter in New Zealand,
that he went there to raise
grandchildren instead of wheat.

Nature, it turns out, isn’t like us;
it doesn’t have a warehouse of memory.
The field doesn’t become afraid of matches,
of young girls. It doesn’t remember
furrows either. It gets killed off, it gets burned,
and a year later it’s alive again
as though nothing unusual has occured.

The farmer stares out the window.
Maybe in New Zealand, maybe somewhere else.
And he thinks: my life is over.
His life expressed  itself in that field;
he doesn’t believe anymore in making anything
out of earth. The earth, he thinks,
has overpowered me.

He remembers the day the field burned,
not, he thinks, by accident.
Something deep within him said: I can live with this,
I can fight it after awhile.

The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,
when he understood that the earth
didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead.
And then go on existing without him.

[From Averno]