Whoever has no house now will never have one.
    Whoever is alone will stay alone
    Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
    And wander on the boulevards, up and down...

  - from Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke


Its stain is everywhere.
The sharpening air
of late afternoon
is now the colour of tea.
Once-glycerined green leaves
burned by a summer sun
are brittle and ochre.
Night enters day like a thief.
And children fear that the beautiful daylight has gone.
Whoever has no house now will never have one.

It is the best and the worst time.
Around a fire, everyone laughing,
brocaded curtains drawn,
nowhere-anywhere-is more safe than here.
The whole world is a cup
one could hold in one's hand like a stone
warmed by that same summer sun.
But the dead or the near dead
are now all knucklebone.
Whoever is alone will stay alone.

Nothing to do. Nothing to really do.
Toast and tea are nothing.
Kettle boils dry.
Shut the night out or let it in,
it is a cat on the wrong side of the door
whichever side it is on. A black thing
with its implacable face.
To avoid it you
will tell yourself you are something,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.

Even though there is bounty, a full harvest
that sharp sweetness in the tea-stained air
is reserved for those who have made a straw
fine as a hair to **** it through-
fine as a golden hair.
Wearing a smile or a frown
God's face is always there.
It is up to you
if you take your wintry restlessness into the town
and wander on the boulevards, up and down.

MILD is the parting year, and sweet
   The odour of the falling spray;
Life passes on more rudely fleet,
   And balmless is its closing day.

I wait its close, I court its gloom,
   But mourn that never must there fall
Or on my breast or on my tomb
   The tear that would have soothed it all.

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

for a moment
the breeze fades
sunlight warms the cool air

Piercing the shrouded sky
They fight against surrounding black:
Like flowers breaking through sidewalk cracks,
The light seeps through the darkness.
Between the leaves
The stars reach for the eyes…

But now thought reaches away:
I escape myself through abstraction
As the past violently asserts itself:
Remembrance induced by a careless focus
On a memory flowing from a present vision:
The tree
now
Clothed in leaves
Beckons forth remembrance:

Autumn leaves,
Trundling into legs only to move past
As they ride the restless winds
Whispering their own poems
Of meaning only experience could collect…
They rush
Through fallow ditches
And enclosing brush which
Form a pattern around
The tree that beckons forth
- With disrobed branches glistening
White under stars,
Dampened by the still-settling dew-
A Self-realization that obliterates all boundaries
And encompasses no thoughts,
but the One
which gives them:
The One which gives a breath
Held together by the moments
Which trail the first puff of white
that joins the airs that wrap themselves
around the tree reaching up to the stars
which do not reflect the one who sees them
but give the light
towards which thought now reaches.

All these memories induce
The longing to feel the openness
No words could possibly posses
As slowly the months fade
Into the dissolving moments it takes
For the eyes to reach up to the light.

The inlets
Wrap around the water
Writhing in the fury of the ocean’s waves,
Obscuring the distance they reveal
To the eyes that gaze absent mindedly
Down their beaches and their cliffs.

Indifferent to the conflict below,
The sun blazes down
But the winds cleanse the skin of its heat
As they are driven from the sea.

The sea that breaks the stoic rocks
And casts the sand’s lonely grains
-Along with the many homeless winds-
Across the beaches which *****
At the feet of their stony bluffs.

But the cliffs stand in austere grandeur
Defiantly surveying the endless waters
Whose numerous, ceaseless, enduring waves
Are kept at bay by the towering unity.

I am of the wind that has no home
In the conflict of sea and land
I am the sun that lights this vision:
Firmament of hills, sea and sand.

Tides come and go but never leave me
Sands shift in time but never deceive me
As sun I shine light on all at hand:
This ceaseless meeting of sea and land.

I can see trees
Unfold with stubborn insistence around the empty field
Where breezes pool in lively airs that dance from sky to ground,
Only to plod into the branches that close them to the stars.  

Lost in the pathways leading nowhere,
The wind forgets from where it came
As branches ****** away its vitality
Dissipated into the quiet weeping of the leaves.

But skimming along the canopy ceiling
Above my head: winds rustle trees,
Enveloping me in the mocking absence
Of the quiet freedom of the open air.

Now wind gently greets me at the edge
Where trees sculpt the field’s subtle form
Which gives the openness its place
And gives pause to a restless mind.  

And now I realize the forest’s trees
Which unfold in their ordered grace,
Allow the freedom of the open to possess
The meaning that I longed to seek.

the silent waves of my thoughts
still crashes me every night.
no, i think i am not sad...
the wind is just so powerful
that it creates water in my eyes.

i wish the storm would go away soon;
i long to have a safe journey
to whom i would be with,
without the print of your name
engraved on my ship's mast.