“Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.”
Lou Andreas-Salome
Muse
by Linda Pastan
after reading Rilke
No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.
Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing.
And sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment
a small voice comes through,
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.
The Sonnets To Orpheus
III
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can enter through the lyre’s strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo.
Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,
not wooing any grace that can be achieved,
song is reality. Simple, for a god.
But when can we be real? When does he pour
the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your voice – learn
to forget that passionate music. It will end,
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
Fourteen Lines 