A Poet Reflects

Who’s turned us around like this,
so that whatever we do, we always have
the look of someone going away?  Just as a man
on the last hill showing him his whole valley
one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers—
so we live, and are forever leaving.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Eighth Elegy” in the Duino Elegies, translated by A. Poulin, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 1977)