Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue by Rainer Maria Rilke

He felt the entrance's green darkness

wrapped cooly round him like a silken cloak

that he was still accepting and arranging;

when at the opposite transparent end, far off,

through green sunlight, as through green window panes,

whitely a solitary shape

flared up, long remaining distant

and then finally, the downdriving light

boiling over it at every step,

bearing on itself a bright pulsation,

which in the blond ran shyly to the back.

But suddenly the shade was deep,

and nearby eyes lay gazing

from a clear new unselfconscious face,

which, as in a portrait, lived intensely

in the instant things split off again:

first there forever, and then not at all.