The Fourths
O trees of life when does your winter come?
We are left standing,
non-migrators, we wither
& flower each year, conflict constant
as appearance & reality, life in death,
death in life, world as eternal present.
All the World’s a Stage––Rilke & Mahler players,
Rilke with his puppets as superior to human beings,
Mahler's Once Upon a Time …
sleigh-bells, the hunting boy’s magic horn.
Look, that puppet on a string is Freund Hein,
a skeleton leading the danse macabre,
playing solo violin (behind us) in the mirror;
Rilke craving angels to become players,
breathe life into stuffed dolls, good riddance
to half-empty masks—Mahler’s welcome adagio
transports our souls across the Jahrhundertwende …
more than the past but not the future …
Mahler states when man, now full of wonder,
asks what all this means, the child is the answer …
‘Das Himmlische Leben’, a weightless world
children are the nearest to, Mahler’s response
to Rilke’s who shows children for what they are
is a child’s sunny, saintly, feastly heaven.
Anthony Costello
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