Day 11: "The Duino Elegies" Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Gary Miranda)

[druidspell]

Voice, forget the courting, the mating call.
You've outgrown that. Even if you could make it a sound
as clear as the bird when the springtime lifts him up
almost forgetting that he's a small nervous thing
and not just a particular heart she's tossing
toward brightness, into the intimate sky.
Just like that, like him, that's how you'd like to call --
so that some mate, even before she saw you,
would feel you and grow hushed, letting her answer
wake slowly and warm itself by listening
until it was the glowing reflection of your own passion.
Oh, and the springtime would understand! Not a place
would fail to carry the tone of announcement.
First, the small blurted question, gradually stilled
to calmness by a day that says, clearly, "Yes!"
Then the stairs, the summoning stairs, leading up
to the fantasized temple of what's toe come.
Then the quivering, the fountain, its urgent spray
already teased into falling by the promising play.

And up ahead, the summer. Not only the mornings
of summer -- not only the way they change into day,
glowing before it begins. Not only the days,
so tender among the flowers and, overhead,
so intensely powerful in the shapes of the trees.
Not only the deep affection of these unharnessed forces,
not only the walks, not only the meadow at evening,
not only, after a late thunderstorm, the clarity of breath,
not only approaching sleep, and the feeling
of anticipation, the evenings...
but the nights!
The tall nights of summer, and the stars,
the stars of the earth. Oh just once to be dead
and to know them forever, all the stars: for how, then,,
how -- how could we forget them?

There. See. I've called the lover. But not only
she would come. Other girls would rise from untenable
graves and present themselves. For how could I qualify
the call, once it's gone out? The buried are always
seeking the earth again. You children --
understand one thing here and now, and it will count
for a lot. Don't believe that destiny is anything more
than what you can pack into childhood: how often
you're tempted to outdo the loved one, panting,
panting for the happy chase -- after nothing, into nowhere!
Just being here is glorious. Even you knew that,
you girls who seemingly missed out on life and sank down
into the vilest streets of the city, that fester
like open sewers. For each of you had an hour --
maybe not quite an hour -- some immeasurable span of time,
a distance between two whiles -- in which you really existed.
Totally. Veins glutted with existence.
But we so easily neglect such a thing because our neighbor
laughs at it or refuses to appreciate it or envy it.
We want something visible, something we can show,
forgetting that even the most visible joy
becomes visible only when we've transformed it, inside.

Love, the world can exist only inside, nowhere else.
Our life goes by in changing. And what's outside
invariably disappears, little by little.
Where a solid house once stood, some fantastic structure
springs up in front of it, all wrong, so completely
a produce of the mind that it might as well
have stayed in the mind. The spirit of the times
builds vast warehouses of power, shapeless
as the desperate haste which it finds in all things.
It doesn't know about temples any more, those extravagant
projects of the heart. We have to preserve them
secretly now. Yes, and even when one of them manages
to survive -- or anything we once prayed to, or reverenced,
or knelt before -- it passes, just as it is,
into the invisible world. Many no longer see it,
and pass up the chance to rebuild it now, inside,
with pillars and statues -- more magnificent than ever!

Each slow turn of the world leaves behind the disinherited,
those who own neither what's been or what's coming next.
For even what's coming next is a long way off for humans.
This shouldn't confuse us; it should make us more determined
to preserve the form we can still recognize:
this once stood in the human world, stood up to fate,
the annihilator, stood in the face of not knowing
where it was going, as though it existed,
and bent stars around it of the knowing heaven.
Angel, I can still show it to you -- there!

If you look it will stand rescued at last, upright
once and for all. Pillars, pylons, the Sphynx,
and -- grey, striving to lift itself out of the crumbling
or foreign city -- the cathedral. The miracle of it!
O look at it, Angel, for this is what we are -- us!
You who are stronger -- tell them that this
is what we can do: my breath is too short to praise it!

And so, after all, we haven't completely neglected to use
these spaces, these huge spaces, these spaces that are ours.
(How incredibly huge they must be if, after thousands
of years of our feelings, they still aren't filled.)
But even one tower was a great achievement, wasn't it?
Great, Angel -- even compared to you. Chartres was great,
and music reached higher still, towering above us.
But even one girl in love -- alone by her window
at night -- just one -- oh, didn't she reach
to your knee?
Don't think I'm courting you.
And even if I were, Angel, you wouldn't come.
For my mating call is always full of "Go back!"
Against such a strong current, you couldn't make
any headway. My call is like an outstretched arm.
And though its open hand reaches up to grasp even you,
the inapprehensible, it remains in front of you --
as defense and warning -- open, wide open.