"You transformed the force and urgency / of your tears into your mature gaze and were just on the point of turning all your / body's juices into a powerful existence, / which would rise and circle, trustingly, in equilibrium. / Then chance, your last encounter with chance, / tore you back from your furthest progress, / back into a world where juices have their will. / Not all at once; tore just a shred at first, / but when, around this shred, day by day, / reality swelled, became heavy, [...]." —Thank you, Rainer Maria Rilke (and translators Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann), for "Requiem for a Friend," in The Essential Rilke, 1999, pp.49-51.