By Rainer Maria Rilke

Every Angel is terror. And yet,

ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly

birds of the soul. Where are the days of Tobias,

when one of the most radiant of you stood at the simple threshold,

disguised somewhat for the journey and already no longer awesome

(Like a youth, to the youth looking out curiously).

Let the Archangel now, the dangerous one, from behind the stars,

take a single step down and toward us: our own heart,

beating on high would beat us down. What are you?

 

Early successes, Creation’s favourite ones,

mountain-chains, ridges reddened by dawns

of all origin – pollen of flowering godhead,

junctions of light, corridors, stairs, thrones,

spaces of being, shields of bliss, tempests

of storm-filled, delighted feeling and, suddenly, solitary

mirrors: gathering their own out-streamed beauty

back into their faces again.

 

For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we

breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,

yielding us fainter fragrance. Then someone may say to us:

‘Yes, you are in my blood, the room, the Spring-time

is filling with you’….. What use is that: they cannot hold us,

we vanish inside and around them. And those who are beautiful,

oh, who holds them back? Appearance, endlessly, stands up,

in their face, and goes by. Like dew from the morning grass,

what is ours rises from us, like the heat

from a dish that is warmed. O smile: where? O upward gaze:

new, warm, vanishing wave of the heart – :

oh, we are that. Does the cosmic space,

we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the Angels

really only take back what is theirs, what has streamed out of them,

or is there sometimes, as if by an oversight, something

of our being, as well? Are we as mingled with their

features, as there is vagueness in the faces

of pregnant women? They do not see it in the swirling

return to themselves. (How should they see it?)

 

Lovers, if they knew how, might utter

strange things in night air. Since it seems

everything hides us. Look, trees exist; houses,

we live in, still stand. Only we

pass everything by, like an exchange of air.

And all is at one, in keeping us secret, half out of

shame perhaps, half out of inexpressible hope.

 

Lovers, each satisfied in the other, I ask

you about us. You grasp yourselves. Have you a sign?

Look, it happens to me, that at times my hands

become aware of each other, or that my worn face

hides itself in them. That gives me a slight

sensation. But who would dare to exist only for that?

You, though, who grow in the other’s delight

until, overwhelmed, they beg:

‘No more’ -: you, who under your hands

grow richer like vintage years of the vine:

who sometimes vanish, because the other

has so gained the ascendancy: I ask you of us. I know

you touch so blissfully because the caress withholds,

because the place you cover so tenderly

does not disappear: because beneath it you feel

pure duration. So that you promise eternity

almost, from the embrace. And yet, when you’ve endured

the first terrible glances, and the yearning at windows,

and the first walk together, just once, through the garden:

Lovers, are you the same? When you raise yourselves

one to another’s mouth, and hang there – sip against sip:

O, how strangely the drinker then escapes from their action.

 

Weren’t you amazed by the caution of human gesture

on Attic steles? Weren’t love and departure

laid so lightly on shoulders, they seemed to be made

of other matter than ours? Think of the hands

how they rest without weight, though there is power in the torso.

Those self-controlled ones know, through that: so much is ours,

this is us, to touch our own selves so: the gods

may bear down more heavily on us. But that is the gods’ affair.

If only we too could discover a pure, contained

human place, a strip of fruitful land of our own,

between river and stone! For our own heart exceeds us,

even as theirs did. And we can no longer

gaze after it into images, that soothe it, or into

godlike bodies, where it restrains itself more completely.

 

Translated by A. S. Kline
© 2001 All Rights Reserved

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