go out into your heart

I borrowed my friend K's copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God back in January, when I was upstate for her secret wedding. K told me to keep Rilke through poetry month, and I can't disappoint her, can I? There are a lot of really spectacular poems in this volume, but this one got me where I live.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust the power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), II, i from "The Book of Pilgrimage," from Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, revised edition, 2005).