Rilke, from Book of Hours

Make me the guardian of your estate,

make me the listener upon the rock,

give me the eye to spread across

your seas of loneliness;

allow me to pair up with the rivers' flow

and flee from the screaming of either side

and drift into the sound of the night.






--


Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans.


Annemarie S. Kidder (Evanston: Northwestern




UP, 2001). p. 167.