Entrance

Whoever you are in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...
• • •
from "Girls":

Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.
• • •
Initial

Out of infinite desires rise
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths-
they come forth in these dancing tears.
• • •
Human Beings at Night

The nights are not made for the masses.
Night divides you from your neighbor,
and by no means are you to seek him out.
And if you light up your room at night
in order to look human beings in the face,
then you must ask yourself: whose.

Human beings are horribly warped by the light
that drips from their faces
and if at night they have gathered together
then you'll see a wavering world
all heaped up at random.
On their foreheads yellow glare has
driven out all thought,
in their eyes the wine flickers,
on their hands hangs
the heavy gestures with which they
understand one another in their talks;
and by which they say: I and I
and mean: Anybody.
• • •
On the Edge of Night

My room and this vastness,
awake over a darkening land,-
are one. I am a string
stretched tightly over wide
raging resonances.

Things are violin-bodies
full of murmuring darkness:
in it dreams the weeping of women,
in it the grudge of whole
generations stirs in its sleep...
I shall vibrate
like silver; then everything
beneath me will live,
and whatever wanders in lost things
will strive toward the light
that from my damcing tone-
around which the heavens pulse-
through thin, pining rifts
into the old
abysses endlessly
falls...
• • •
Presentiment

I am like a flag surrounded by distances.
I sense the winds that are coming, and must live them,
while the things down below don't yet stir:
the doors still close softly, and in the chimney's there's silence;
the windows don't tremble yet, and the dust is still calm.

Then I know the storms already and grow embroiled like the sea.
And I spread myself out and plunge deep inside myself
and cast myself off and am entirely alone
in the great storm.
• • •
from "The Man Watching"

Winning does not tempt him.
His growth is: to be the deeply defeated
by ever greater things.
• • •
from "Requiem"

For you were not happy in all that brilliance,
every color lay on you like guilt,
and you lived in impatience,
for you knew: this is not the whole.
Life is only a part... of what?

from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow