*The Duino Elegies

The Duino Elegies -Rainer Maria Rilke
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror is to say that Birth is nothing but the beginning of Death. Then, ask me, ask, to what is the beginning of Death? The only medicament is Night. Oh and night: there is night... Because Light and Lovers are only masks—inadequately covering the terror. Masquerades of levity we are. And wasn’t it Goethe who said that if the world wasn’t inherently dark then we wouldn’t need light. And didn’t he also say that architecture is frozen music. What then is poetry, but unfettered dirt. Angels, chronologically, are pre-dirt. Man is post-rock. Poetry is un-rock. Music is etymologically earth-angel. Architecture, then, is to Poetry what an edifice is to marble slab. What then, Rilke, has mustered under his open window with the violin pealing along the breeze, is an unwieldy temple for metaphors (instead of vice-versa). On its altar shines a Mask to end all Masks. In which we disguise our dark souls with darkness and disappear into immortality. No, not even Women in Love can penetrate this totality, not even the Hero or Rome or Gaspara Stampa or Nietzsche or the Army of Children Crusaders can fade into the unremitting tides of eternity like Goethe’s Homunculus martyring himself to the lowest of forms, knowing in complete faith that over the millennia he will fall into the cycle of evolution and attain its highest state: a worthy lover. He died for worth. For boys drink wine, men drink port, but heroes drink brandy. Quaff, then, Ahab! Consecrate and Consanguinate! And then abandon. Complete, inexhaustible idealism. The poet is a Young Man—the only soul with the tension to withstand the bowstring, to fire the quiver into the unknown. For still stillness is worse than death. We must be, as Miller says, still as the hummingbird. For there is no place where we can remain.
You can remain in the beloved.
Restrain him.
Oh gently, gently, wash the atavistic graveyards with your soft steps, flicker away the battling phalluses like a fly on a hot day, landing to rub his feet in the sweet sweat-manna of your arms, a hot day, the glaze down your neck, flood the dried-up riverbeds with your tears of joy, with your birth-giving tears. For even lovemaking is a birth. And drown the rivers. But don’t be his mother. But don’t be his lover. And don’t hide his face.
Let it encounter all the world and be stunned forever.

…And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.