Day 9: "The Duino Elegies" Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Gary Miranda)

[druidspell]

But what are they doing here, these acrobats,
a little more fugitive, even, than us?
Who are they trying to please? What sadistic will
compels them from earliest childhood to perform
such violent contortions? It wrings them,
bends them, slings them and swings them,
throws them up and catches them: as though the air
were freshly waxed, they slide back down
to this threadbare carpet worn thin by their endless
leaping. And the carpet itself seems lost in space,
stuck on there like a bandage, as though the earth
had scraped itself on the suburban sky.

And no sooner
are they there, standing on display --
standing for display, like a capital "D" --
than the gripping urge returns as always and spins
even the strongest of them away -- just for fun --
as August the Strong used to do with a tin platter
at dinner time.

Oh and around this center the audience
blooms and fades, like the petals of a rose.
Around this pestle, this pistil, impregnated
by its own pollen, fertilized once more
for the fake fruit of a boredom no one acknowledges,
a thinly disguised boredom glazed over
with synthetic smiles.

There, the shriveled, withered weight-lifter,
old now, but still good for drumming up business,
shrunken up inside his bulk of skin as though
it contained two men -- one who now lies in the churchyard,
and this one, who outlived the other, deaf
and sometimes a bit strange in his widowed skin.

And then there's the young man, the leader,
who seems the offspring of a neck and a nun,
tightly packed with muscles and innocence.
Oh but you other two,
looking as though you'd been presented as toys
to a small pain during one of its long convalescences:
you, the boy, who with a thud peculiar to unripened fruit
fall a hundred times a day from the acrobat tree
(which, quicker than water, has spring, summer, and fall
in a matter of minutes), landing with a bounce on the grave.
Sometimes you glance at your seldomly tender mother
and a loving look begins on your face --
hesitant, shy, hardly attempted before it spreads itself
over all your body, whose surface quickly absorbs it.
For again the clapping hands of the leader are saying
"Jump down!" -- and before that other pain has time
to reach your racing heart and define itself,
the burning in the soles of your feet begins,
forcing up into your eyes a few physical tears.
And yet, blind to it all, the smile...

O Angel, take it! Pick that small-flowered herb of healing!
Preserve it in a vase! Put it with those joys
you're saving for us. Praise it on the delicate vase
with a flowery, soaring inscription:
"Subrisio Saltat."

And then you, little girl, the sweet one,
you whom even the most tempting joys leap over in silence.
Maybe the fringes of your dress are happy for you --
or the green metallic silk over your firm young breasts,
maybe it feels endlessly pampered, in need of nothing.
You,
publicly displayed on shoulders,
always balancing yourself on the swaying scales,
like freshly-stacked fruit in a market.

Oh where is the place I keep in my heart
where they didn't know how to balance yet,
where they fell from each other like mating animals
that are badly paired, where the weights are still heavy,
where the sticks continue their stupid spinning
as the platters go wobbling off...?

And suddenly in this tiresome nowhere, suddenly
the indefinable point where obvious Too-little
turns around, changes itself into that empty Too-much.
Where, despite all the digits, the score
adds up to zero.

Places, oh the place in Paris, endless showplace,
where the milliner, Madame LaMort, curls and twists
the restless ways of the world like endless ribbons,
creating the latest in bows, frills, flowers, rosettes,
and artificial fruits -- all falsely dyed --
to decorate the cheap winter hats of fate.

Angel: suppose there's another place,
one we know nothing about, and suppose that there,
on some wonderful carpet, lovers managed to accomplish
what they're always failing at here -- the daring maneuvers
of their high-flying hearts, the pyramids of their pleasure,
ladders leaning only against each other
with no ground underneath, and trembling --
suppose they could manage it there, surrounded
by a ring of spectators, the countless silent dead:
wouldn't the dead, then, finally, throw down
the forever-valid coins of happiness they're always
hoarding, always hiding from us -- throw them down
in front of that couple whose smile at last
would be real, out there, on that hushed carpet?