WHY POETS?
Gravity
Center, how you withdraw yourself
from everything, even from those who fly
you recover yourself, center, you, the strongest.
He, standing: as a drink
rushes through thirst, so gravity him.
Yet from the sleeper falls,
as from the low-hanging cloud,
ample rain of heaviness.
Schwerkraft
Mitte, wie du aus allen
dich ziehst, auch noch aus Fliegenden dich
wiedergewinnst, Mitte, du Stärkste.
Stehender: wie ein Trank den Durst
durchstürzt ihn die Schwerkraft.
Doch aus dem Schlafenden fällt,
wie aus lagernder Wolke,
reichlicher Regen der Schwere.
Here what is called gravity is not the same as physical gravitation, which is what we usually hear about; instead, it is the center of beings in their entirety. Rilke calls it therefore "the unheard center" (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 28). The center is the ground, the fellowness, which by mediating holds one thing to another and gathers everything in the game of risking. The unheard center is "the eternal fellow-player"9 in the worldgame of being. The same poem which speaks poetically of being as the risk calls (lines 11 and 12) the mediating attraction "the gravity of the pure forces." Pure gravity, the unheard center of all risking, the eternal partner in the game of being, is the risk.
By casting off what is risked, the risk simultaneously retains it in the balance. Risk lets what is risked loose, indeed in such a way that it lets loose what is cast off into none other than pull or traction [Zug] toward the center. What is risked is vested with this traction toward the center. In this pull, the risk always retrieves what is risked. To retrieve something, to get hold of something from somewhere, to have it come, to attract it, we call "beziehen." This is the original meaning of the word "Bezug." We still speak of the "Bezug" of merchandise, salary, or current. The traction, which as the risk concerns and affects all ·beings with traction, and retains them in traction toward itself, is attraction [Bezug] absolutely. The word "das Bezug" is a fundamental word of Rilke's valid poems; to be precise, in
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