once, more intimate

.

.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies

the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.

For it too feels the presence of what often 

overwhelms us: a memory, as if

the element we keep pressing toward was once

more intimate, more true, and our communion

infinitely tender.  Here all is distance;

there it was breath.  After that first home,

the second seems ambiguous and drafty.

.

Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains

forever inside the womb that was its shelter;

joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up

even at its marriage: for everything is womb.

And look at the half-assurance of the bird,

which knows both inner and outer, from its source,

as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,

flown out of a dead man received inside a space,

but with his reclining image as the lid.

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature

that has to fly.  As if terrified and fleeing

from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way

a crack runs through a teacup.  So the bat 

quivers across the porcelain of evening.

.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us.  We arrange it.  It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

.

Who has twisted us around like this, so that

no matter what we do, we are in the posture

of someone going away? Just as, upon

the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley

one last time, he turns, stops, lingers -,

so we live here, forever taking leave.

.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpt from the Duino Elegies

.