In the deep nights, I dig for you, you treasure.
For all riches have been only
poverty and wretched simulacrum
of your beauty, which still waits undisclosed.
But the path to you is far and long unwalked
and covered over almost past discerning.
You are alone. You are solitude itself,
you heart, roaming valleys with far-off hills.
And my hands which are bloody from digging:
I lift them, hold them open in the wind,
spread them so they can branch out like a tree.
And with them I suck you from the sky
as if you'd exploded there in a million pieces
from some rash gesture you made
and fell now, a disintegrated world,
from distant stars once more upon the earth--
gently, the way a Spring rain falls.
--Rilke, from The Book of Hours, 1905
