Close By

You, neighbour god, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking,
it is because I rarely hear you breathe,
though know: you’re in your room alone.
And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
But I am listening. Just give me a sign.
I am close by.

Only a thin wall lies between us,
mere happenstance; for it would take
only a call from your lips or from mine
to break it down
without a sound.

The wall is builded of your pictures.

They stand before you hiding you like names.
And when the light within me blazes high
– that in my inmost soul I know you by –
the radiance is wasted on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,
exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.
_{Rainer Maria Rilke}