Evening

Slowly the evening changes its array,

held for it in a belt of ancient trees;

you watch: and bands of landscape slip from you,

one heavenward and one that falls away; 

and you are left not quite part of either,

not quite as shadowed as a house in silence,

or certain in invoking the eternal

as that which grows to star each night and rises-

and leaving you (for untold disentangling)

your life, immense, maturing and unsure,

so that, by turns confined and comprehending,

it alternates as stone in you and star.

Rilke