be earth now, and evensong

I've been reading Rilke recently, The Book of Hours. There's a great preface in the edition I have, where the two translators (Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy) each explain what Rilke's poems mean to them. Anita Barrows writes about an experience walking home from Sabbath services with her father when she was six years old:

"There on the boulevard, amid the noise and bustle of Brooklyn, was this delicious mulching smell, this crispness, this crackling noise of dry red and yellow leaves. The smell awakened me after the morning spent in the dim, drafty synagogue, where I had to sit upstairs listening to the men chanting below in a language I did not understand. God made these leaves, this smell, I said to myself, and suddenly it occurred to me that God created the world because he was lonely. He needed it -- needed the ripeness of autumn, the bright air, the sunlight making patterns on the sidewalk through linden leaves that were yet unfallen. God had created all this, and us as well, to keep him company. That far, chilly place where he lived had felt empty to him without our world."

Perhaps leaves and rivers and stones are just cold, solid objects, and perhaps my thoughts are simply neurons firing. But when I am reading Rilke, I feel that I, and they -- and all of this -- are somehow sacred. Rilke's poems are openings in the clouds, fleeting glimpses into the deeper, spiritual nature of the physical world and of my experience in it. They urge me to look deeper, to pay attention, to do whatever I can to connect with myself, with the world, and with the people in it.

from The Book of Hours:

*******

In deep nights I dig for you like treasure.
For all I have seen
that clutters the surface of my world
is poor and paltry substitute
for the beauty of you
that has not happened yet...

My hands are bloody from digging.
I lift them, hold them open in the wind,
so they can branch like a tree.

Reaching, these hands would pull you out of the sky
as if you had shattered there,
dashed yourself to pieces in some wild impatience.

What is this I feel falling now,
falling on this parched earth,
softly,
like a spring rain?

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, II, 34

*******

You are not surprised at the force of the storm --

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know: 

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.

The trees' blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust the power 

when you plucked the fruit;

now it becomes a riddle again,

and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew

where each thing stood. 

Now you must go out into your heart 

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, II, 1