Excerpts from Rilke's letters on love

...You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg of you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, wihout noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always a beginning--to be a beginner!


...


Some day,... some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being.

This advance will (at first much against the will of the outstripped men) change the love-experience, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.

More from Rilke

The Lovers

See how in their veins all becomes spirit:
into each other they mature and grow.
Like axles, their forms tremblingly orbit,
round which it whirls, bewitching and aglow.
Thirsters, and they receive drink,
watchers, and they see: they receive sight.
Let them into one another sink
so as to endure each other outright.

Rilke--Summer, 1908

The Seventh Phallic Poem, by Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a sequence of seven poems, called The Seven Phallic Poems, all on the theme of love and all containing phallic imagery. What I enjoy about this, the seventh poem in the sequence, is more than just the way Rilke captures so exactly the experience of orgasm. It is also the way he combines the wonderful physicality of that human experience with the emotional component that exists so sweetly for people who truly love each other.

VII

How I called you. This is the mute call
which within me has grown sweet awhile.
Now step after step into you I thrust all
and my semen climbs gladly like a child.
You primal peak of pleasure: suddenly well-nigh
breathless it leaps to your inner ridge.
O surrender yourself to feeling its prilgrimage;
for you'll be hurled down when it waves on high.

November, 1915

Poems from Rilke on love

These poems all come from a collection, translated and compiled by John J.L. Mood, of poems and essays of Rainer Maria Rilke. They are all on the subject of love.





You declare you know love's nights? Have not bud
and sepal of soft words blossomed in your blood?
Are there not on your beloved body places
which recollect like open faces?
. . . . . . . . these soft
nights hold me like themselves aloft
and I lie without a lover.


Summer, 1909





What fields are fragrant as your hands?
You feel how external fragrance stands
upon your stronger resistance.
Stars stand in images above.
Give me your mouth to soften, love;
ah, your hair is all in idleness.

See, I want to surround you with yourself
and the faded expectations lift
from the edge of your eyebrows;
I want, as with inner eyelids sheer,
to close for you all places which appear
by my tender caresses now.

Summer, 1909






WOMAN'S LAMENT I

And the last perhaps will not return
and knows me not although I burn.
Ah the trees overhang glowingly
and I feel no one feeling me.

Early 1911






WOMAN'S LAMENT II

So like a door which won't stay closed,
my moaning embraces open in sleep
again and again. Oh nights of woe.

Outside grows the garden gently in the moonlight
and the blossoms dim my window
and the nightingale is not in vain.

Early 1911

Love's Vernal Equinox

There is a time, early,
in the meeting-mating dance
of soon-to-be lovers
when the heart rises up
in earnest, full and aching,
open as a petal blossom.
When lips leap to say, "I love you"
but pull back, furling those words
like the fronds
of sweet, young
fiddlehead ferns.

While the ice lets go
and smelts start their nightly runs,
two hearts race in unison--
Two minds drink in possibility--
inhaling the newness of each other.

Love is stirring
as ardently as spring.
It arrives just as suddenly,
with a warming breeze and the joy
of longer light on evening waters.

Be still and wait.

If it comes,
it will be in a rush of birdsinging,
frogpeeping, rainspattering,
crocusbursting, budswelling,
riverrunning, mudstomping,
fieldburning, grassgrowing,
sunwarming, groundsoftening,
daylengthening
splendor
that you cannot miss.

Sacred Sex

It's the first day of spring
and things are heaving
among the detritus
of last summer's perennial beds.
Crocuses and hyacinths
press upward,
arching their
smooth
round
tips
through slits
of softening mulch.
 
It's a wild ride
through the sleepy villages
of Brooks, Monroe and Thorndike, Maine,
this morning,
with Rte. 139 erupting
in fissures of frost heaves.
 
I arrive in Unity
in anything but that state.
It's impossible to achieve
with so much friction
between things I should
and things I want to do.

Above all
there's a burgeoning question
about the unity
between sex and the sacred
that stern-faced nuns proscribed
in cryptic messages
from religion class, 1966.
 
What's a good girl to do, then,
when desire is a burning sword
she'd like
plunged into
her Catholic
resistance?
 
Ah...
fuck.
 
Tonight,
I'll make a slow burn
in the woodstove,
lay this man down
in my four-poster bed,
and make love to him
from this space
of liking and wanting.
 
Seems sacred enough to me.
 

Cybersex

Tonight, in a moon-soaked bedroom,
on sheets of cotton,
under heaps of blankets,
I take my online lover
to my four-poster bed.
Every time his messages enter
my in-box, I reply the ecstasy,
shiver through electronic foreplay,
of vowels and consonants,
periods and question marks,
love in 12-point Arial font,
with SEX in the subject line.

I let his words glide in and out of me,
and as he writes, "I miss you,"
I build toward orgasm, as--
letter
after
letter--
his love explodes
on my LCD screen.

Finally, we climax
in a torrent of key strokes
as, somehow, in the ether,
we happen to each press SEND
at the exact same moment,
hotmailing something as close to love
as two online lovers can get.

The Exquisite Skin

I want to dance
I want to sing
I want to let the music fill me
as you have.

I want to move
I want to breathe
I want to feel
Soft hands in my hair
Warm breath on my neck
Your eyes watching me move
Me feeling your hunger.

It is the exquisite skin that’s missing
In the meeting of our minds.
That soft and salty sensuousness,
That seals the envelope of lust.

I’ve imagined
Your first touch
Over and over.
On my face—
A soft caress.
On my lips—
A finger’s press.

And when we come together,
It’s not quite in heat
But, rather, in a warm and final knowing.

Love and Algebraic Logic

Problem #1:
Divide this relationship
into two equal (unequal?) parts--
the writer and the mathematician--
and find the minimum and maximum values
of the objective quantity.
Is there such a thing?
An objective quantity
in a relationship
where words and numbers
are seeking to intersect?

Writers write, emote, express, mark, inscribe, put pen to paper, compose, create, jot down, record--
all in an effort to translate emotion
into words on a page
and feelings in a heart.

Mathematicians cipher,
clip their language
into numeric equivalents
that condense the heart's vast space
into one side of the equation.

Is it possible to graph love's vertices?
Chart its depths?
Simplify it to the least common denominator?

Can you solve love's conflict
using the elimination method
with a value for love's unknown?

When love's lines intercept
and you factor in everything--
all the emotion and the uncertainty--
all the anticipation
and nuances of expression and gesture--
what's created?
An inverse of a relationship?
Happy-ever-after polynomial bliss?
Or the leftovers from the inequality?
Where, exactly,
is the midpoint between lover and loved
with a mathematician and a writer?