in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets
that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps
the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
Rilke has a way of doing with words what I strive to do in design: To say the most with the least and most appropriate. His poems have a clean line and no extraneous drop-shadows or gimmicks to make them seem like more than they are. When I read lines like, "Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished.", I know the thought intimately from wondering the streets of Madrid as a tenager looking for "her".
(She) who never arrived, for me could not ever actually arrive, because her very being (and perhaps tragic attraction) was defined by unrequitedness...
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