A Poet Reflects

Lullaby

Someday if I lose you,
how will you sleep without
my whispering above you
like the linden’s branches?

Without my lying here
awake and placing words, almost
like eyelids, on your breasts,
your limbs, your lips.

Without my closing you
and leaving you alone with what is yours
like a garden with a mass
of mint-balm and star-anise.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Rose Window and Other Verses from New Poems, selected and illustrated by Ferris Cook (Bulfinch Press, 1997)

                     Black Cat

                     A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
                     your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
                     within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
                     will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

                     just as a raving madman, when nothing else
                     can ease him, charges into his dark night
                     howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
                     the rage being taken in and pacified.

                     She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
                     into her, so that, like an audience,
                     she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
                     and curl up to sleep with them.  But all at once

                     as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
                     and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
                     inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
                     suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Rose Window and Other Verse from New Poems (Bulfinch Press, 1997)

Translated by Stephen Mitchell