another saturday poem

i'm sick. like sick to the point where you wish you could just stop breathing and be put out of your misery sick.  i'm also on call, and rounded (medical word for going to see patients in the hospital) on 8 sicker people before i came home and got sick. i really hope i didn't make them any sicker.  but after 8 awful hours, i think i've turned the corner- which means it's my kind of an illness- the sprinter kind- violent, terrible, perfectly horrible, but short lived. now i'm in bed and achey- which is way better than not being able to get up off the cold bathroom floor.


so because it's saturday and because i'm feeling badly...here is a poem by rainer marie rilke


You come and go.  The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost with out a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow.  For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.