Kuriosities

“I am so like the little anemone I once saw in the gardens in Rome; it had opened itself up so wide in the course of the day that when night fell it was no longer able to close. It was quite shocking to see it so open in the darkened meadow, still avid to take in - into its frantically-wide-open chalice; swamped by the night above it – inexhaustible…I, too, am as irremediably turned outwards, and I am consequently distracted by everything, refusing nothing. My senses, altogether without my permission, make towards every disturbance: when there is noise, I give myself up and am that noise – and since anything that is focused on stimulus wants to be stimulated, I clearly want to be disturbed, and am so, without end.” ~ Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus II – V

Flower-muscle, that opens the anemone
meadow-mornings little by little,
until the light of heaven’s loud polyphony
pours into its womb of petals,

in the flower-aster’s silence,
tense muscle of endless receiving,
sometimes overcome by such abundance,
that the sleep-sign of evening

is hardly able to give the widely-sprung
petal-edges back to you, then:
you, so many worlds’ power and directive!

We last longer, we the violent ones.
But in which of all our lives, oh when,
will we at last be open and receptive?