Jardin des Plantes, Paris, France, autumn 1981.

By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Jonathan Steffen

His gaze, filled with the flitting of the bars,
is so tired it can take in nothing new.
It seems there are a thousand bars to pass
and out beyond those thousand bars no view.
 
The soft gait with its supply powerful pace
that turns in tiniest circles round and round
is like a potent dance about a place
in which a mighty will stands chained and bound.

Just sometimes will the curtain of the eye
be drawn aside. An image enters then,
goes through the poise of static limbs to fly
unto the heart and find its end.

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