only in the spell of your renouncing

What birds fly through is not that intimate space
in which you feel all forms intensified.
(There, in the Open, you’d be denied yourself
and vanish on and on without return.)

Space reaches out from us and translates each thing:
to accomplish a tree’s essence
cast inner space around it, out of that space
that has its life in you.  Surround it with restraint:
in itself it has no bounds.  Only in the spell
of your renouncing does it rise as Tree.

Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Edward Snow