Duino Elegy V

by Rainer Maria Rilke, freely rewritten in English by Robert Dawson

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

Who are they, these acrobats, flightier
Than we are, whisked out of childhood
Prematurely, by a will for whose or Whose
Sake never sated? So that it wrings them, slings them,
Loops the loop and through the hoops them,
From grease-papered flatironed air settling where
Their effortless toe springs have rubbed threadbare
The carpet, cosmetic, cosmic
Shinplaster on the sky’s suburban
Backstab at Earth! 
                                 And there
Not right side up! There!
The musclebound monk’s book capital There.
Even the burliest riled in the grasp
Reciprocal, as August the Strong mashed 
Tin plate at his table.

Ach! And on this centerpiece, the rose
Of spectacle blooms and leafs out. On this
Pistil which its own pollen dusts,
This pestle which its own dust pollinates,
This too often pregnant ripeness, fake
Fruit of boredom, theirs, unbeknownst,
This sham shimmery veneer of smile.

There’s the withery wizening lifter
Whose job is drumming things up,
Whose puckered hide might once have been
The nakedness of two strong men …
What with one in the churchyard, the leftover’s proud,
Deaf and a teeny bit queer
In his widowed skin.

The young one, the Adult, primps like the son
Of a neck by a nun! Stuffed to his chin
With balls and simplicity.

Oh, You! Boychild,
Your nitwit plaything, pain,
Once a small gift in your longest
Convalescence …
Unripe! The way a fruit knows how to fall
A hundred drops per day, you drop from the tree
Of well managed motion, that tree that knows
Just spring and fall, a drop of water falling, 
Drops and bounces on the grave
Half pause of half applause.
Tenderness flits on your face for your seldom
Tender mother, ripples then
On the patchy motley on your limbs, 
Too timid to be an attempt. Again
The man below you claps your downward flounce
Before pain bounces on your leaping heart.
Your foot soles tingle from the jump to come,
Pounding a few tears upward to your eyes, and numb
You smile …  
                          Angel! Pluck it! Hold it!
That grass flower herb! Toss a pot
To preserve it! Shelve it with the joys
Not unsealed for us! A lovely urn
Regaled with a flowery maxim: Subrisio saltat!

You also, Dearest, almost erased
By exquisite joys! Your frills perhaps
Are happy for you! Or scouring pad green silk
Over your stiff young breasts feel coddled,
Thinks of nothing it needs. Served up 
Again and again on the trembling scale pan
Of shoulders, freshly marketed fruit
Of serenity.

                    Where is the place
I took in my own heart
Where these were not so capable, sometimes fell
All over each other like clambering cubs,
Their ziggurats not skillfully stepped …
Where weights weigh too much
And hoops still slither, swirl
From their sticks?

Suddenly this tiresome Nowhere
Where too little unspeakably turns
Into empty too much,
Where the long quadratics
Solve into zero.

Infinite showplace! Squares of Paris
Where the modiste Madame Lamort
Warps and ribbons the ways of the world …
Part and parcel with her chic innovations –
Cockades, cock feathers, dyed fruits and flies
To jewel the cheap winter hats of fate.


Angel! Think that there’s a place we know nothing about
Where on an indescribable carpet, acrobat
Lovers show all they can’t handle! Figure eight
Figures of heart flight, towers of joy, 
Ladders that skinny up under them propped
Just on each other. Do it for spectators, 
The numberless unmurmuring Dead!
Wouldn’t the Dead fling their last unexpected 
conscientiously hidden, never spent if ever spendable
Money of happiness down on the finally
Truthfully smiling pair on the carpet?