A Poet Reflects

Wenn es nur einmal so ganz stille wäre

If only for once it were still.
If the not quite right and the why this
could be muted, and the neighbor’s laughter,
and the static my senses make—
if all of it didn’t keep me from coming awake—

Then in one vast thousandfold thought
I could think you up to where thinking ends.

I could possess you,
even for the brevity of a smile,
to offer you
to all that lives
in gladness.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)