With only this one dream

Understand, I'll slip
quietly away from the noisy
crowd when I see 
the pale stars rising, blooming over
the oaks. I'll pursue solitary
pathways through the pale
twilit meadows with only this
one dream: you come too.

Love Song

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweet song.

Late Autumn in Venice

Already the city no longer drifts

like a bait, catching the days as they surface.

The glassy palaces ring more brittly

against your gaze. And from the gardens



the summer hangs like a heap of marionettes,

headfirst, exhausted, done in.

But from the ground, out of old forest skeletons,

volition rises: as if overnight



the commander of the sea had to double

the galleys in the sleepless arsenal,

in order to tar the next morning breeze



with a fleet, which pushes out rowing

and then suddenly, all its flags dawning,

seizes the high wind, radiant and dire.

Autumn day

God, it's time. Summer was long.
Cast shadows on the sundials,
and let the winds loose on the fields.

Urge the last fruits to fullness; give them
just two more sun-warmed days
to move to ripen, to squeeze
their final sweetness into heavy wine.

Anyone with no home now
will not be making one.
Anyone who is alone
will live on long alone,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the streets, up and down,
restless, while the leaves blow.

falling stars

Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived

Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

~from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke