Meet All Goodbyes Head-On, Rainer Maria Von Rilke

Meet all goodbyes head-on, as if they were behind

you, because winter eventually goes by.
Because under winter it is so endlessly winter
that, overwintering, your heart survives entire.

Be always dead in Euridice—, climb singing,
climb praising back under the clean covers.
Here, among the dwindling, be in the richness of left-overs,
be a ringing glass that broke itself in ringing.

Be—and likewise know the non-being proviso,
the infinite ground of your inner vibration,
that you realize completely this one time.

To the used, as to the deaf-and-dumb,
goes the fullness of nature, that unspeakable sum.
Count yourself up in rejoicing and destroy the number.