From: Alan Hirsch

Dear Rowly,

I thought I’d send you some Rainer Maria Rilke, my absolutely favourite poet _________

I am you, anxious one /Don’t you sense me, ready to break at your touch? /My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. /Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness? /Hasn’t my longing ripened in you from the beginning as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming. /When you want to awaken, I am that wanting: /I grow strong in the beauty you behold. /And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time.

No one lives his life. /Disguised since childhood. haphazardly assembled from voices and fears and little pleasures, we come of age as masks. /Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses where all these lives are laid away like suits of armour or old carriages or clothes hanging limply on the walls

Maybe all the paths lead there to the repository of unlived things.

And yet, though you and I stuggle against this deathly clutch of daily neccesity, /I sense there is this mystery /All life is being lived. /Who is living it then?

Is it the things themselves, or something waiting inside them, like and unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters? /Is it the branches that signal to each other? /Is it the flowers interweaving their frangrances, or streets, as the wind through time?

Is it the animals, moving, or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it then? God, are you the one who is living life?