Every Angel Is Terror

...line from the Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Fellow Poet Tony Brown says he's: going to have it tattooed on my back next time I go in for ink. In the original German of course.

I'm dipping into the Elegies as I work, in preparation for my performance in Duino next month. There's a danger of falling into Rilke's words, lines that make me gasp, and turn my fingers to water on the keyboard.

We never have pure space in front of us,
not for a single day, such as flowers open
endlessly into. Always there is world,
and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,
unwatched-over, that one breathes and
endlessly knows, without craving.

The Eighth Elegy