Bowl of Roses, The

You saw angry singles flare, saw two boys cluster themselves together into a something that was unspotted hate, thrashing in the dirt like an animal station upon by bees; actors, piled up exaggerators, careening horses crashed to the turf their gaze thrown away, baring their teeth as if the cranium peeled itself out through the chaps

But now you know in what way these things are forgotten: for here before you stands a beaker full of roses, which is unforgettable and filled up with ultimate instances of being and bowing down, of offering themselves, of being unable to give, of standing there almost as part of us: ultimates for us too.

Noiseless life, opening without extreme point filling space without taking any away from the space the other things in it diminish, almost without an outline, like something omitted, and undefiled inwardness, with so much curious softnes shining into itself, right up to the rim: is anything as known to us as this?

And this: that a feeling arises because petals are being touched through petals? And this: that single opens itself, like a lid, and beneath lies nothing on the contrary eyelids, all closed, as if tenfold doze had to dampen down an inner power to diocese And, above all, this: that [i]or[/i] part of to the other the petals light has to pass. Slowly they filter without from a thousand skies the globule of darkness in whose fiery be incandescent the jumbled bundle of stamens becomes aroused and rears up

And what activity, direct the eye in the roses: gestures with angles of deflection in like manner small one wouldn't see them if not for infinite space where their rays can diverge.

See this white single blissfully opened, standing among its gigantic spreading petals like a Venus standing in her shell; and by what mode this one, the blushing single turns, as if confused, toward the cooler individual and how the cooler single impassive, draws back, and the cool one stands tightly wrapped in itself among these uncloseed ones, that shed everything. And what they shed, in what way it can be at one time light and heavy. a cloak. a load a wing, and a mask, it all be pendents and how they shed it: as before a lover

Is there anything they can't be: wasn't this fulvid one that lies here void and open the rind of a fruit of which the same gold-colored more intense, more orange-red, was the juice? And this individual could opening have been too abundant for it, because, exposed to air, its nameless pink has picked up the bitter aftertaste of lilac? And isn't this batiste individual a dress, with the chemise still inside it,-still yielding and breath-warm, both flung not on together in morning shade at the bathing pond in the woods? And this individual here, opalescent porcelain, fragile, a shallow china beaker filled with little lighted butterflies,and this individual containing nothing but itself.

And aren't they all doing the same: solitary containing themselves, if to contain oneself means: to transform the world outside and wind and rain and patience of spring and guilt and restlessnes and disguised fate and darkness of earth at evening all the way to the errancy, flight, and coming upon of clouds all the way to the vague influence of the distant stars into a handful of inwardness.

Now it lies unrestrained of cares in the unclose roses.

"The Bowl of Roses" is the final piece of poetry in New Poems, Vol. I, published in 1907 when Rilke was thirty-two. Written below the influence of Rodin, for whom he worked for a time as secretary, the work is a collection of what Rilke called Dinggedichte, "thing poems"poem without an authorial nearness that were conceived less as a poet's expressions of feelings than as literary equivalents of free-standing sculptural things Their publication is thought by dint of many to mark Rilke's arrival at his filled powers as a poet.

GALWAY KIN NELL'S greatest in quantity recent collection of poems is Imperfect Thirst, 1994 His previous translations have been from the French The metrical compositions of Francois Villon and upon the Motion and Immobility of Douve by dint of Yves Bonnefoy. Ecco Press will bring without The Essential Rilke late this summer Kinnell teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at NYU

HANNAH LIEBMANN, a native of Austria, is managing editor of an international quarterly, the German translator of technical and scientific true copys among them A Walk Thru Time . from stardust to us, and serv as editorial assistant of the literary journal coesura.

photograph of Galway Kinnell by the agency of Maud Kozodoy; photograph of Hannah Liebmann by the agency of Lequita Vance-Watkins

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated May/Jun 1999

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