Free The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke Page B

youth,
    for months, for weeks, for just a few more days,
    oh not for days: for nights, for just a night,
    for one more night, for just this one: for this.
    The god refused; and then
he
started screaming,
    and screamed it out, held nothing back, screamed
    as his own mother once had screamed in childbirth.
    And she came up beside him, an old woman,
    and his father came up also, his old father,
    and both stood waiting—old, decrepit, helpless—
    beside the screaming man, who, as never before
    so closely, saw them, stopped, swallowed, said:
    Father,
    do you care about the wretched scrap of life
    still left you, that will just stick in your throat?
    Go spit it out. And you, old woman, old
    Mother,
    why should you stay here? you have given birth.
    And grabbed them both, like sacrificial beasts,
    in his harsh grip. Then suddenly let them go,
    pushed the old couple off, inspired, beaming,
    breathing hard and calling: Creon! Creon!
    And nothing else; and nothing but that name.
    Yet in his features stood the other name
    he could not utter, namelessly expectant
    as, glowing, he held it out to the young guest,
    his dearest friend, across the bewildered table.
    These two old people (it stood there) are no ransom,
    they are used up, exhausted, nearly worthless,
    but you, Creon, you, in all your beauty—
    But now he could no longer see his friend,
    who stayed behind; and what came forth was
she
,
    almost a little smaller than as he knew her,
    slight and sad in her pale wedding dress.
    All the others are just her narrow path,
    down which she comes and comes—: (soon she will be
    there, in his arms, which painfully have opened).
    But while he waits, she speaks; though not to him.
    She is speaking to the god, and the god listens,
    and all can hear, as though within the god:
    No one can be his ransom: only I can.
    I
am
his ransom. For no one else has finished
    with life as I have. What is left for me
    of everything I once was? Just my dying.
    Didn’t she tell you when she sent you down here
    that the bed waiting inside belongs to death?
    For I have taken leave. No one dying
    takes more than that. I left so that all this,
    buried beneath the man who is now my husband,
    might fade and vanish—. Come: lead me away:
    already I have begun to die, for him.
    And veering like a wind on the high seas,
    the god approached as though she were already
    dead, and instantly was there beside her,
    far from her husband, to whom, with an abrupt
    nod, he tossed the hundred lives of earth.
    The young man hurried, staggering, toward the two
    and grasped at them as in a dream. But now
    they had nearly reached the entrance, which was crowded
    with sobbing women. One more time he saw
    the girl’s face, for just a moment, turning toward him
    with a smile that was as radiant as a hope
    and almost was a promise: to return
    from out of the abyss of death, grown fully,
    to him, who was still alive—
    At that, he flung
    his hands before his own face, as he knelt there,
    in order to see nothing but that smile.
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO
    We cannot know his legendary head
    with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
    is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
    like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
    gleams in all its power. Otherwise
    the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
    a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
    to that dark center where procreation flared.
    Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
    beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
    and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
    would not, from all the borders of itself,
    burst like a star: for here there is no place
    that does not see you. You must change your life.
WASHING THE CORPSE
    They had, for a while, grown used to him. But after
    they lit the kitchen lamp and in the dark
    it began to burn, restlessly, the stranger
    was altogether strange. They washed his neck,
    and since they knew nothing about his life
    they lied till they produced another one,
    as