Evening

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL #1

Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;

and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs—

and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in and now embracing
grows alternately stone in you and star.

—Rainer Maria Rilke
(From The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow, North Point Press, 1991)