faces

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Have I said it before?  I am learning to see.  Yes, I am beginning. 

 It's still going badly.  But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are.

  There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces,

 because each person has several of them.  There are people 

who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out,

 gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn

 during a long journey.  They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; 

they never change it, never even have it cleaned.  It's good enough,

 they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, 

since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do

 with the other ones.   They keep them in storage.  Their children will wear them. 

 But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them.  

And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another,

 and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply;

 but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one.

 There is, to be sure, something tragic about this.  They are not accustomed

 to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week,

 has holes in it, is in many places a thin as paper, and then, little by little,

 the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself,

 forward into her hands.  It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. 

 I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her.  When poor people 

are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed.  Perhaps their idea 

will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps

 out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street,

 as if they were wooden clogs.  The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out

 of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. 

 I could see it lying there: its hollow form.  It cost me an indescribable effort

 to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them.

  I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid 

of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell

art by michael d. edens

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