Entrance

“Entrance”

Whoever you may be:  in the evening, leave

the shelter of your room where you know everything;

for your house stands at the edge of great distances—

whoever you may be.

With your eyes, so tired that they can

barely free themselves from the worn threshold,

you lift up with measured pace a single black tree

and place it before the empty skies—slender, alone.

And have made the world.  And it is vast

and like a word still ripening in the silences.

And as your will grasps its meaning,

your eyes tenderly relinquish it all. . .

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Eingang”; in Das Buch der Bilder I, 1;

   The Book of Images I, 1; translated from the German

   by Mark S. Burrows (©2011)