[you who never arrived]

You who never arrived

in my arms, Beloved, who were lost

from the start,

I don't even know what songs

would please you, I have given up trying

to recognize you in the surging wave of the next 

moment.  All the immense 

images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,

cities, towers, and bridges, and un-

suspected turns in the path,

and those powerful lands that were once

pulsing with the life of the gods -

all rise within me to mean

you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all 

the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing.  An open window

in a country house -, and you almost

stepped out, pensive, to meet me.  Streets that I chanced upon, -

you had just walked down them and vanished.

And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors

were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back

my too-sudden image.  Who knows?  perhaps the same

bird echoed through both of us 

yesterday, separate, in the evening...

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from the Uncollected Poems

translated by Stephen Mitchell

.