A Stillness Comes

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory's might.
--James Thomson

Gillian Welch: I Dream a Highway

Were it possible for us
to see further than
our knowledge reaches,
and yet a little way
beyond the outworks
of our divinings,
perhaps we would
endure our sadnesses
with greater confidence
than our joys.
For they are the moments
when something new
has entered into us,
something unknown;
our feelings grow mute
in shy perplexity,
everything in us withdraws,
a stillness comes,
and the new,
which no one knows,
stands in the midst of it and is silent.
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet