Rilke In Sunday LA Times Book Review

[s~Z]

Dedicated to anonymous posters and P-List lurkers everywhere:

   Entrance By Rainer Maria Rilke

     Whoever you are: in the evening step out
     of your room, where you know everything;
     yours is the last house before the far-off:
     whoever you are.
     With your eyes, which in their weariness
     barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
     you lift very slowly one black tree
     and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
     And you have made the world. And it is huge
     and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
     And as your will seizes on its meaning,
     tenderly your eyes let it go. . .

     Translated From The German By Edward Snow
     From "America's Favorite Poems: A Favorite Poem Project Anthology,"
edited by Robert Pinsky and    Maggie Dietz (W.W. Norton: 328 pp, $25)