Palm

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Palm 

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk

only on feelings. That faces upward

and in its mirror

receives heavenly roads, which travel

along themselves.

That has learned to walk upon water

when it scoops,

that walks upon wells,

transfiguring every path.

That steps into other hands,

changes those that are like it

into a landscape:

wanders and arrives within them,

fills them with arrival. 

The Sonnets To Orpheus: Iv 

O you tender ones, walk now and then

into the breath that blows coldly past,

Upon your cheeks let it tremble and part;

behind you it will tremble together again.

O you blessed ones, you who are whole,

you who seem the beginning of hearts,

bows for the arrows and arrows' targets--

tear-bright, your lips more eternally smile.

Don't be afraid to suffer; return

that heaviness to the earth's own weight;

heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

Even the small trees you planted as children

have long since become too heavy; you could not

carry them now. But the winds...But the spaces....

At The Brink Of Night

My room and this distance,

awake upon the darkening land,

are one. I am a string

stretched across deep

surging resonance.

Things are violin bodies

full of murmuring darkness,

where women's weeping dreams,

where the rancor of whole generations

stirs in its sleep . . .

I should release

my silver vibrations: then

everything below me will live,

and whatever strays into things

will seek the light

that falls without end from my dancing tone

into the old abysses

around which heaven swells

through narrow 

imploring 

rifts. 

Behind The Blameless Trees 

Behind the blameless trees

old fate slowly builds

her mute countenance.

Wrinkles grow there . . .

What a bird shrieks here

springs there like a gasp of warning

from a soothsayer's hard mouth.

And the soon-to-be lovers

smile on each other, not yet knowing farewell,

and round about them, like a constellation,

their destiny casts

its nightly spell.

Still to come, it does not reach out to them,

it remains

a phantom

floating in its heavenly course.