orchards in space

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Those lines, from Rilke's poem, Autumn,

 kept running through my head this weekend in the Catskills.

I posted it last year too, when I was cleaning out the store
and we still had world's ugliest kitchen.

Four seasons ago. 

It feels like another life.

Autumn

     

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

     

as if orchards were dying high in space.

    

 Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no".

And tonight the heavy earth is falling,

     

away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.

     

And look at the other one ... It's in them all.

     

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

    

 infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

                               

                        -Rainier Marie Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)