The last berries on the mountain ash

My life is not this precipitous hour

in which You see me hurrying so.

I am a tree standing before what I once was;

I am only one of my many mouths,

the one quickest to close.

I am the stillness between two notes

which become but poorly used to each other,

because the note “death" wants to raise itself. . .

But within this dark interval both reconcile

themselves, trembling. . .

                                    and the song remains beautiful.  

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Prayers of a Young Poet, translated by Mark S. Burrows (Paraclete Press, forthcoming in October, 2012)

Our lives seem defined by "precipitous hours" and all our hurrying.  Appointments.  Meetings.  Obligations.  It wears us down, this pressing need for involvement.  The demands of the daily.  The tide of work and the seemingly endless horizon of discouragement and disappointment.  What does it take to see this for what it is and choose life?

Several cedar waxwings come daily to feed in the mountain ash outside my study windows.  Patiently they look for the last clinging berries on the tree--once, in August, abundantly present in clusters of plump, bright orange bursts.  Now, the last have lost their color, darkened by the cold and shrivelled.  And yet still they lure these little birds who patiently search for them, branch by branch, and, finding, seem delighted with themselves.

They know no obligation other than their yielding to the hunger that shapes their wintering lives, and the intensity of the search.