(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, poem I,1 from “Book of a Monastic Life”)
We are lonely,
the tea and me
and nine o’clock.
So I ask Rilke
to join us. He tells me,
just as the sun
leaps over the mesa
and enters the window,
that nothing has ever
been real without
my beholding it.
I sit a long,
long time considering
his words. Not the sun?
Not the tea? Not
the gray moth?
The Holocaust?
He tells me this:
All becoming
has needed me.
Looking over the white field
to the blue spruce in the grove
I do not hear
one of them fall.
the closing lines read like a koan. actually, the whole of the poem seems so.
especially like the opening: We are lonely,/the tea and me/[and moreso especially this:] and nine o’clock.
Great opening three lines, which are melodious as well as all-encompassing: time, matter, and emotion. And such a gracious invitation to Rilke, to sort things out, to make sense of the perception of it all. That tree falling, I think I heard that before 🙂