Found Art, Rilke, Atwood, and Evanescent Time

Found in my files, probably from 1986. 
 The photos are of my mother.  The words in the sky say:
"Wait for me,  Wait for me"

"Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do

we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away?

Just as that person on the last hill, 

which shows him 

his whole valley 

one last time,

turns, stops, lingers - so we live,

forever taking our leave."

Rainier Maria Rilke,  Duino Elegies

When I was in Graduate School in the mid 80's, I was absorbed in three things - New Age spiritual explorations, the poetry of Rainier Maria Rilke, and time, as so incomprehensively and evocatively was demonstrated by a box of old photos (from the 20's and 30's) that I had inherited from my mother.

Somehow, in retrospect, those three themes are not unrelated.  Rilke's poetry, for me, is always achingly full of an ungraspable, but longed for, "other realm" that, somehow, exists within the here and now.  That's the best I can do to explain the poignancy I so often found in both his poems (particularly from the Duino Elegies) and those photographs of a child, or a young woman, who was then in her 80's.  The stories behind those old black and white photos seemed so much more mysterious than the brief bits she had ever revealed to me about her life.  Now approaching my own mid 70's, my mother gone, most of my family gone, so many journeys made, treasured in my memory box, and never to be returned to now.......... yes, I find myself wondering how I also 

"turn, stop, linger - so we live,

forever taking our leave."

Here is another  photo, and poem, that fascinated me, a photo of my mother at the age of 9, riding a pony, in Griffith Park.  Mysterious, that photo, that "stamp on a postcard to Forever".  And here is the poem I found by Margaret Atwood, who also, at sometime, perhaps had the same encounter with Evanescent Time.