"Raum. If there were one word it would be Raum. The space of things. The space of outer space. The space of night which comes through porous windows to feed our faces. The mystical carpet where lovers wrestle. The womb of the mother. Weltraum. Not just the room in which the furniture of the world rests, but the space of the things themselves. The space made by Being's breathing. Then Innerweltraum. (The German language, the German spirit, can and must compound.) Not just the space we call consciousness, but the space where we retire in order to avoid a feeling, the touch of a lover, the plea of a friend, the threat of intimacy. Distance. Darkness dotted by stars. These spaces are always palpable, as though space were smoke, or the mountains of the heart where the last hamlet of feeling may be discerned. The carious distances of death. Time itself is a spaceline. For when we are dead we journey on through what we once believed was past. Cathedral spaces. the spaces made by music. Innerweltraum. The slopes shaped by the word in the countrysides of poetry.

/

Music: breathing of statues. Possibly:

stillness in pictures. Speech where speech

ends. Time upright and poised

upon the coastline of our passions.

Feelings for whom? You are the transformation

of all feeling into-what?...audible landscape.

You stranger: music. Heart's space

that's outgrown us. Innermost us

which it's scaled, surmounted, gone beyond

into holiest absence:

where what's within surrounds us

the way the most skillful horizon does.

or the other sides of the air,

pure,

immense,

no longer lived in"

W Gass (commentary), RM Rilke (poem)