Come you, the last one I recognize,
hopeless pain in the physical tissue:
how I burned in spirit, look, I burn
in you; the wood has resisted for a long time,
to reconcile with the flame you blaze,
but now I feed you and burn in you.
My native gentleness will be reflected in your anger,
a wrath of hell unlike anything from here.
Completely pure, quite haphazard, free from the future,
I ascend the confused pyre of suffering,
certain I won’t be able to buy a future anywhere
around this heart, in which the reserve is silent.
Am I still the one burning unrecognizably?
I don’t bring the memories inside.
O life, life: externally.
And me in flames. Not one knowing me.
[Waiver. This is not what sickness was once like
in childhood. Procrastination. Pretext
to become bigger. Everything shouted and whispered.
Don’t mix what previously amazed you in this.]
Valmont Sanatorium, mid-December 1926. Last entry in last pocket notebook
before Rilke died of leukemia on December 29.
Translated from the German by Wally Swist.
Wally Swist’s Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois) was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. He also authored Aperture (Kelsay), a collection of poems on caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s.
