VENICE, LATE AUTUMN
Rainer Maria Rilke
The city no longer drifts like angler’s
bait that catches all the rising days.
Glass palaces sound shivery to your gaze
and from the gardens, summer dangles
like a heap of marionettes, heads
flopped, done in, played out.
And yet the will gets up from its bed
of bones on the forest floor as if, overnight
the Lord of the sea had already
doubled the galleys in the wide-eyed Arsenal
to tar next morning’s air
with a thrusting fleet, beating its oars,
spreading its flags, suddenly
snatching the wind, radiant and lethal.
VENETIAN MORNING
Rainer Maria Rilke
The windows prized by princes always see
what deigns to vex us now and then:
when shimmers in the sky meet
feelings of high tide, the city once again
takes shape without becoming real.
Each morning’s task is to display
the opals worn by her the day before, and reel
from her canals reflections that re-play
memories of all those other days
till she consents and yields
like a nymph receiving Zeus. Her earrings ding
their warning in her ears and yet she reaches for
San Giorgio Maggiore,
and coolly lifts it, smiling at the pretty thing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The city no longer drifts like angler’s
bait that catches all the rising days.
Glass palaces sound shivery to your gaze
and from the gardens, summer dangles
like a heap of marionettes, heads
flopped, done in, played out.
And yet the will gets up from its bed
of bones on the forest floor as if, overnight
the Lord of the sea had already
doubled the galleys in the wide-eyed Arsenal
to tar next morning’s air
with a thrusting fleet, beating its oars,
spreading its flags, suddenly
snatching the wind, radiant and lethal.
VENETIAN MORNING
Rainer Maria Rilke
The windows prized by princes always see
what deigns to vex us now and then:
when shimmers in the sky meet
feelings of high tide, the city once again
takes shape without becoming real.
Each morning’s task is to display
the opals worn by her the day before, and reel
from her canals reflections that re-play
memories of all those other days
till she consents and yields
like a nymph receiving Zeus. Her earrings ding
their warning in her ears and yet she reaches for
San Giorgio Maggiore,
and coolly lifts it, smiling at the pretty thing.