Entrance By Rainer Maria Rilke

Whoever you are: in the evening step out

of your room, where you know everything;

yours is the last house before the far-off:

whoever you are.

With your eyes, which in their weariness

barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,

you lift very slowly one black tree

and place it against the sky: slender, alone.

And you have made the world. And it is huge

and like a word which grows ripe in silence.

And as your will seizes on its meaning,

tenderly your eyes let it go. . .

Translated From The German By Edward Snow

From “America’s Favorite Poems: A Favorite Poem Project Anthology,” edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (W.W. Norton: 328 pp, $25)