My Life 

- Rainer Maria Rilke

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between the two notes, which are somehow always in discord because death's note wants to climb over ~ but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful..

Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, translation by Robert Bly, Harper Row, 1981.