Possibility of Being: A Selection of Poems by Rilke Rainer Maria

Author:Rilke, Rainer Maria [Rilke, Rainer Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: poetry
ISBN: 9780811224970
Goodreads: 25622320
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1977-01-17T08:00:00+00:00

REQUIEM

(1909)

FOR A FRIEND

I have my dead, and I would let them go

and be surprised to see them all so cheerful,

so soon at home in being-dead, so right,

so unlike their repute. You, you alone,

return; brush past me, move about, persist

in knocking something that vibratingly

betrays you. Oh, don’t take from me what I

am slowly learning. I’m right; you’re mistaken,

if you’re disturbed into a home-sick longing

for something here. We transmute it all;

it’s not here, we reflect it from ourselves,

from our own being, as soon as we perceive it.

I thought you’d got much further. It confounds me

that you should thus mistake and come, who passed

all other women so in transmutation.

That we were frightened when you died, or, rather,

that your strong death made a dark interruption,

tearing the till-then from the ever-since:

that is our business: to set that in order

will be the work that everything provides us.

But that you too were frightened, even now

are frightened, now, when fright has lost its meaning,

that you are losing some of your eternity,

even a little, to step in here, friend, here,

where nothing yet exists; that in the All,

for the first time distracted and half-hearted,

you did not grasp the infinite ascension

as once you grasped each single thing on earth;

that from the orbit that already held you

the gravitation of some mute unrest

should drag you down to measurable time:

this often wakes me like an entering thief.

If I could say you merely deign to come

from magnanimity, from superabundance,

because you are so sure, so self-possessed,

that you can wander like a child, not frightened

of places where ther’re things that happen to one—

but no, you’re asking. And that penetrates

right to the bone and rattles like a saw.

Reproach, such as you might bear as a spirit,

bear against me when I withdraw myself

at night into my lungs, into my bowels,

into the last poor chamber of my heart,

such a reproach would not be half so cruel

as this mute asking. What is it you ask?

Say, shall I travel? Have you left somewhere

a thing behind you, that torments itself

with trying to reach you? Travel to a country

you never saw, although it was as closely

akin to you as one half of your senses?

I’ll voyage on its rivers, set my foot

upon its soil and ask about old customs,

stand talking with the women in their doorways

and pay attention when they call their children.

I will observe how they take on the landscape

outside there in the course of the old labor

of field and meadow; will express a wish

to be presented to the king himself,

and work upon the priests with bribery

to leave me lying before the strongest statue

and then withdraw, shutting the temple doors.

But in conclusion, having learnt so much,

I’ll simply watch the animals, that something

of their own way of turning may glide over

into my joints; I’ll have a brief existence

within their eyes, that solemnly retain me

and slowly loose me, calmly, without judgment.

I’ll make the gardeners repeat by heart

the names of many flowers and so bring back

in pots of lovely proper names a remnant,

a little remnant, of the hundred perfumes.

And I will purchase fruits too, fruits, wherein

that country, sky and all, will re-exist.

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