(Still) My Favorite Poem.

Looking through my old blog (pre-"Rant") I found this.

I was just sitting around listening to some music and paging through some books when I stumbled on a poem that I hadnt looked at in a couple of months. I am not a huge poetry person but there is so much beauty in the translation of this poem by Rainer Rilke its almost overwhelming to me. Would love to hear what people think about it....

[You who never arrived]

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging of of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities,towers, and bridges and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house--, and you almost
stepped out , pensive, to meet me. Streets that I have chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...