Rainer Maria Rilke

trans. by Alfred Corn

The Fifth Elegy

dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig

Tell me who they might be, these transients, a touch more 
fly-by-night even than ourselves, troupers who early on 
get stung by, wrung by, a will (whose will? for whose sake?)
that never seems satisfied. Instead, it wrings them,
bends, loops, and swings them, flings 
and catches them up again; as if, through an air
oiled for greater smoothness, they land
on a worn-out carpet, made still more threadbare
by their eternal leaping up: a scrap of carpet
now lost in the great sum of things,
laid down like a bandage, as though skies
over the city’s outskirts had wounded the ground
                        And no sooner do they pose—
upright, on display, Doggedness’s outsized 
initial D—than the strongest are just for fun rolled up again
by a grip as relentless as Augustus the Strong’s, who once
at table did the same to a pewter plate.  

Yes, and around this
center onlookers form a rose:
which blooms and lets fall its petals. Around this 
piston, this pistil, brushed by its own
pollen and again made to produce
the wax fruit of tedium, never
acknowledged by it—a tedium gleaming
with the thinnest overlay of fake, weightless smiles.

Look: the sagging, wrinkled strongman,
the oldster who nowadays only beats the drum,
shrunken away in his tough hide, as though it had earlier
contained two men, one of them
already asleep in the graveyard, survived meanwhile by the other,
deaf and often a little
confused in his widower’s skin.

But the younger one, the adult, looks like the hybrid
of a neck and a nun: stalwart, yes, pumped up
with muscles and naïveté.   

Oh all of you there, given
like presents to Sorrow (back when it was still little),
a toy to play with during one
of its long convalescences . . . .    

And then there’s you, as yet unripe, who, 
with the sort of thud that only dropped fruit makes,
fall every day a hundred times from the tree of jointly
constructed routines (faster than water, in a few
moments it passes through spring, summer, and autumn)—
you plummet and crash on the grave:
sometimes, in an instant, a loving look
will grow from within all the way to a mother 
seldom kind to you; yet it thins out over your body,
whose surface leaches away that shy,
barely attempted expression . . . and again 
the man claps his hands for your leap, and before
pain comes into sharp focus close to your constantly
racing heart, a burning sensation in your footsoles
outruns that first ache, and a few palpable tears
get hurried right into your eyes.
Nevertheless, in all blindness,
that smile . . . 

Angel! Oh take it, gather that small-blossomed heal-all.
Get a vase to keep it in! Put it among those joys still not
available to us. In a lovely urn acclaim,
and with a lavish flourish inscribe on it: Subrisio Saltat. 

And then you, lovely thing,
you, the one silently leapt over 
by the most magical joys. Maybe your fringed hems
do the job of feeling your happiness for you—
or else the green, metallic silk 
covering your firm young breasts considers
itself altogether indulged, and lacks for nothing.  
You,
constantly shifted on the balancing trays of the scale
indifference’s vended fruit put on display,
exhibited among men’s shoulders.

Oh where is that place now—I keep it in my heart—
where they still weren’t very skillful, still broke
apart like poorly-matched animals
trying to mate with each other—
the place where barbells are still heavy,
where plates on pointlessly
turning batons still do
reel about . . . .  

And suddenly in this burdensome Nowhere, suddenly
the ineffable place, where pure Scarcity
is mysteriously transfigured—and whirls about
into an empty Surfeit.
Where the computation with multiple digits
is solved and with no remainder.

Squares. O Paris square, eternal showcase
where the milliner Madame Lamort
loops and winds those endless ribbons, anxious
roadways of the earth, and from them invents
new bows, ruches, flowers, cockades, artificial fruits—all
dyed improbable colors—for the cheap
winter bonnets donned by Fate.

Angel! If there were a square we didn’t know of, a place where, 
on a mysterious carpet, lovers might perform all they’d never
managed to master on earth, their bold, high-flying 
patterns for leaps the heart made across space, towers
built of pleasure, ladders set up on no foundation, for a long time
trembling and leaning only on each other—and could
master it all for the circle of spectators, the numberless, voiceless dead:
Wouldn’t that crowd now toss their last coins—ever saved up,
ever hidden away and unknown to us, this eternally
valid currency of happiness—towards
the couple at last truthfully smiling there 
on the requited carpet? 

Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems, two novels, and three collections of essays. He has received the Guggenheim, the NEA, an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and one from the Academy of American Poets. In 2016 a celebration of the 40th anniversary of his first book All Roads at Once was held at Poets’ House in New York, and in 2017 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, widely considered one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century. Alfred Corn’s new translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies is forthcoming from Norton.