Streams.

Fragonard, Philosopher Reading, 1770

For your sake poets sequester themselves,

gather images to churn the mind,

journey forth, ripening with metaphor,

and all their lives they are so alone…

And painters paint their pictures only

that the world, so transient as you made it,

can be given back to you,

to last forever.

All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa

some woman has long since ripened like wine,

and the enduring feminine is held there

through all the ages.

Those who create are like you.

They long for the eternal.

They say, Stone, be forever!

And that means: be yours.

And lovers also gather your inheritance.

They are the poets of one brief hour.

They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile

as if creating it anew, more beautiful.

Awakening desire, they make a place

where pain can enter;

that’s how growing happens.

They bring suffering along with their laughter,

and longings that had slept and now awaken

to weep in a stranger’s arms.

They let the riddles pile up and then they die

the way animals die, without making sense of it.

But maybe in those who come after,

their green life will ripen;

it’s then that you will inherit the love

to which they gave themselves so blindly, as in a sleep.

Thus the overflow from things

pours into you.

Just as a fountain’s higher basins

spill down like strands of loosened hair

into the lowest vessel,

so streams the fullness into you,

when things and thoughts cannot contain it.

Rainer Maria Rilke