(Rainer Maria Rilke)
I am blind, you out there. That is a curse,
An abomination, a contradiction,
A daily weight.
I lay my hand on my wife’s arm,
My gray hand on her gray gray,
And she leads me through empty space.
You move and shove and think that you
Sound different from stone on stone.
You are mistaken: I alone
Am, am in torment, and bawl
Inside me something interminably
Howls, and I can’t tell what’s howling,
My heart or my bowels.
You recognize the songs? You haven’t sung them
Not in this key, quite.
To you, at morning, the new light
Comes warm in your open house.
And you’ve a sense of seeing eye to eye,
And that tempts one to show mercy.
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