Evening
      by Rainer Maria Rilke

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant 
     in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as 
     the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night,
     and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.