elegy

Excerpt from The Fifth Elegy (for Frau Hertha Koenig) by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Angel, there's a place beyond us, and there
on the unsayable carpet, lovers display what now
they can never bring up to knowing - their bold
high figures of heartplay, their
long-since groundless ladders, leaning
on only each other, tremulously, - and know
before the surrounding onlookers, innumerable soundless deaths.
Who then throws their last, ever-hoarded,
ever-concealed, unknown, eternally
valid coins of luck before the finally
truly-smiling pair on the stilled
carpet?