ABSTRACT
The invisible temple in the ear of the creatures of stillness, the wounded flowers laid out on the garden table, the resonance of Rilke’s poetry, all outlast the illusory material edifices we erect to preserve the objects of our longing and the objects of our possession. The tree is a figure for the Rilkean poem, as are the cut flowers on the table, as is the face’s breakable inwardness, as we shall see. “Calmed by listening,” we preserve the tree, the flowers, the face in the stillness that enables listening.
