Poetry Page 4

Love-Song
Ranier Maria Rilke

How shall I hold my soul, that it may not be touching yours?
How shall I lift it then above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot, with some lost thing
the dark is isolating on some remote and silent spot that,
when your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.

You and me - all that lights upon us, though, brings us together
like a fiddle bow drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instruments have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hands?
O sweetest song.

Somewhere I Have Never Travelled
e.e. cummings

somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
touching skillfully, mysteriously her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of it’s countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

I do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

This Is the Creature
Ranier Maria Rilke

This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved
as though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace
of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,
but only with the possibility
of being. And that was able to confer
such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.

Quietly it stole up to a maid - to be
within the silver mirror and in her.

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