Rilke

4.24.2007

Part One
XIII

Full round apple, peach, pear, blackberry.
Each speaks life and death
into the mouth. Look
at the face of a child eating them.

The taste comes from afar
and slowly grows nameless on the tongue.
Where there were words, discoveries flow,
released from within the fruit.

What we call apple--dare to say what it is,
this sweetness which first condensed itself
so that, in the tasting, it may burst forth

and be known in all its meanings
of sun and earth and here.
How immense, the act and pleasure of it.


-Rainer Maria Rilke
from In Praise of Mortality