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One cannot own a flower’s blooming. Nor can one hold a bird’s flight. Beside the knowledge of the gesture of small flowers, the poet “must feel how birds fly,” Rainer Maria Rilke declares in the same paragraph from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. They fly lightly. In the flight of birds, a world arises opposed to the world of commercial things: the realm of imagination, an inwardness open, infinite, unlimited by material parameters. The gentleness of dispossession defines Rilke’s work as much as the elegy, as much as the regret of things. Regretting is itself a form of resignation, resignation a form of letting go; dispossession is a “movement,” as Maurice Blanchot puts it that “releases us.” The flight of birds thus reveals itself as a metaphor for an imaginary space, a movement of gentleness, gentleness as a movement that traverses a space without limits or division.