All drawings untitled 2004
We're mouths, no more. Who sings the distant heart
that, whole and hale, inheres within all things?
Its mighty beat into small hammerings
in us has been spaced out. So, too, the smart,
the pain- too great for us, like its great joy.
So we tear loose from it repeatedly
and are mere mouth. But right into our fleeing
bursts that great heartbeat, unpredictable,
so that we yell-,
becoming visage, transformation, being.
Rilke
All drawings untitled 2004
Again and again, though we know the landscape of love
and the little graveyard with lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again we go out in couples
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the wild flowers, facing the sky.
Rilke
All drawings untitled 2004
Abandoned bare on the heart's mountains. Look, how small there,
look: the last little village of words, and higher,
but also how small, a last
homestead of feeling. Familiar to you?
Abandoned bare on the heart's mountains. Rock base
under your hands. True, something blossoms
here; from silent erosion
an unknowing herb breaks into blossom, singing.
But the knowing man? He who began to know
and is silent now, abandoned bare on the heart's mountains.
True, with awareness intact many a creature
moves about, many a mountain animal lives secure,
changes and stays. And the great bird at home here
circles the pure negation of peaks.- But
homeless here on the heart's mountains...
Rilke
All drawings untitled 2004
Complaint
To whom, heart, would you complain? Ever more unfrequented
your way grapples on through incomprehensible
human kind. All the more vainly perhaps
for keeping to its direction,
direction towards the future,
the future that's lost.
Before. You complained? What was it? A fallen
berry of joy, an unripe one.
But now it's my tree of joy that is breaking,
what breaks in the gale is my slow
tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible
landscape, you that brought me more close to the
ken of angels, invisible.
Rilke
All drawings untitled 2004
But you, divine one, you resounding to the end.
When attacked by the swarm of rejected maenads,
gorgeous god, you drowned out their shrieks with order,
the architecture of your song rose from the destroyers.
Not one of them could crush your head or lyre,
despite their wrestling and raging;
and touching you, all the sharp rocks they fired
at your head turned tender, gifted with hearing.
Ravaged by vengeance, at last they broke and tore you.
But the echo of your music lingered
in rocks and lions, trees and birds. You still sing there.
Oh you lost god! You everlasting clue!
Because hate finally dismembered, scattered
you, now we're merely nature's mouth and ears.
Rilke
(Sonnets to Orpheus: First Series)
All drawings untitled 2004
Look at the flowers, true to earth's ways,
we lend them fate from the rim of fate-
but who knows! If they deplore their decay,
it's up to us to be their regret.
All wants to float. But we trudge around like weights.
Ecstatic with gravity, we lay ourselves on everything.
Oh what tiresome teachers we are for things,
while they prosper in their ever childlike state.
If one took them into intimate sleep and slept
deeply with things- oh how light he'd come
back, changed with change of day, out of a mutual depth.
Or perhaps he'd stay; and they'd bloom and praise him,
the convert who's now like one of them,
all the calm sisters and brothers in the meadow's wind.
Rilke
(The Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Series)
All drawings untitled 2004
Silent friend of many distances,
feel how your breath is still expanding space.
Let yourself peal among the beams
of dark belfries. Whatever preys
on you will grow strong from this nourishment.
Know transformation through and through.
What experience has been most painful to you?
If the drinking's bitter, turn to wine.
In this vast night, be the magic power
at your senses' intersection,
the meaning of their strange encounter.
And if the earthly has forgotten
you, say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.
Rilke
(The Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Series)
All drawings untitled 2004
How a bird's cry can move us...
Any once-created crying.
But even children playing
in the open cry beyond real cries...,
Cry accident. They drive their screams'
wedges into those interstices
of cosmic space (in which bird-cries
go unharmed, as men go into dreams).
Oh where are we? Freer and freer,
like kites torn loose, tattered by wind,
we race in midair, edged with laughter.
Singing god, order the criers,
so they awake resounding like a current
carrying the head and the lyre.
Rilke
(The Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Series)
All drawings untitled 2004
Grey love-snakes I drove out of your
armpits. As on hot stones
they lie on top of me now, digesting
great lumps of satisfied lust
Rilke
All drawings untitled 2004
I wish I were wise! I wish I were wise
from the heart of me, like my serpent.
Nietzsche
All drawings untitled 2004
Now she runs madly through the cruel desert
and seeks and seeks from soft grassland-
my old, wild wisdom!
Nietzsche
All drawings untitled 2004
But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself
the flames that break from me.
Nietzsche
All drawings untitled 2004
You are no eagles: no neither do you know
the spirits joy in terror. And he who is not a
bird shall not make his home above abysses.
Nietzsche
