Or someone dying is it, and, near death, does not see death but stares beyond it, his gaze perhaps large as the mammals'. As children we lose ourselves to this in silence, until abruptly shaken. It's always the real world, never a Nowhere void of negation, a pure Unsurveillance that can be inhaled, forever known and thus not craved. Yet we don't, not even for a single day, have pure space before us, a place where flowers forever bloom.

That, only we see the unhindered animal keeps its decline and sunset ever behind it, with God before and, if it walks, goes forward in timelessness, like springs that well and flow. What does exist outside we come to know from their faces alone in fact, we make even young children turn and take a backward look at fixed concepts, not at the openness deep in those mammal features. Only our seeing is retrospective, set like traps around them, an obstacle that blocks the path to freedom. And we can no longer gaze after it into images, that soothe it, or into godlike bodies, where it restrains itself more completely.With all of their eyes, animals behold openness. If only we too could discover a pure, contained human place, a strip of fruitful land of our own, between river and stone! For our own heart exceeds us, even as theirs did. Those self-controlled ones know, through that: so much is ours, this is us, to touch our own selves so: the gods may bear down more heavily on us. Weren’t you amazed by the caution of human gesture on Attic steles? Weren’t love and departure laid so lightly on shoulders, they seemed to be made of other matter than ours? Think of the hands how they rest without weight, though there is power in the torso. And yet, when you’ve endured the first terrible glances, and the yearning at windows, and the first walk together, just once, through the garden: Lovers, are you the same? When you raise yourselves one to another’s mouth, and hang there – sip against sip: O, how strangely the drinker then escapes from their action. So that you promise eternity almost, from the embrace. I know you touch so blissfully because the caress withholds, because the place you cover so tenderly does not disappear: because beneath it you feel pure duration. But who would dare to exist only for that? You, though, who grow in the other’s delight until, overwhelmed, they beg: ‘No more’ -: you, who under your hands grow richer like vintage years of the vine: who sometimes vanish, because the other has so gained the ascendancy: I ask you of us.

Have you a sign? Look, it happens to me, that at times my hands become aware of each other, or that my worn face hides itself in them.

Lovers, each satisfied in the other, I ask you about us. And all is at one, in keeping us secret, half out of shame perhaps, half out of inexpressible hope. Only we pass everything by, like an exchange of air.

Look, trees exist houses, we live in, still stand. Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange things in night air.

Duino elegies