Robert Stone
Rilke unplugged
in your presence
I’m too alone
yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy
I’m too small
yet not small enough
to be in your presence
like a thing, like a thing, just as it is
in the world, in the world, just as it is
- from Rilke's The Book of Hours I,13
(based on the translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
in the madhouse
They are quiet now. The walls
inside their minds have fallen.
The hours of understanding
draw near and soon will pass.
Sometimes at night, watching at the window,
it is suddenly all right.
What their hands touch is solid,
and their hearts lift as if in prayer.
Their eyes gaze, relieved,
upon the garden
at last undeformed, and safely
contained within its square,
which in contrast to the uneasy world
keeps being itself and never gets lost.
-from New Poem
(translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
to what can we turn
Oh, to what, then, can we turn
in our need?
Not to an angel. Not to a person.
Animals, perceptive as they are,
notice that we are not really at home
in this world of ours. Perhaps there is
a particular tree we see every day on the hillside,
or a street we have walked,
or the warped loyalty of habit
that does not abandon us.
Oh, and night, the night, when wind
hurls the universe at our faces.
For whom is night not there?
-from the First Duino Elegy
(translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
alone
of my heart I will make a tower
and stand on its very edge
where nothing else exists
just once again pain
what cannot be said
and once again world
once again in all that vastness
the single thing I am
one final face
what can never be appeased
in all that vastness
the single thing I am
one final face
what can never be appeased
that ultimate face
enduring as storm
at one ….
at one with its gravity
drawn by distances into some promise
-from the Book of Hours
(translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
afternoon, before Beethoven's Missa Solemnis
Let yourself not be misled by the notes
that fall to you from the generous wind.
Wait watchfully. Hands that are eternal
may come to play upon your strings.
-from Early Journals
(translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
am I not the whole?
God, are you then the All?
And I the separated one
who tumbles and rages?
Am I not the whole?
Am I not all things
when I weep,
and you the single one, who hears it all?
-from the Book of Hours II,3
(translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)
you come and go
You come and go.
The doors swing closed
ever more gently,
almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through
the quiet houses,
you are the quietest ...
For all things sing you:
at times we just hear them more clearly.
… I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest. (I am here.)
You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.
-from the book of Hours I, 45
(translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)