To Music

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:

silence of paintings. You language where all language

ends. You time

standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation

of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.

You stranger: music. You heart-space

grown out of us. The deepest space in us,

which, rising above us, forces its way out,--

holy departure:

when the innermost point in us stands

outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other

side of the air:

pure,

boundless,

no longer habitable.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Rainer Maria Rilke