Two New Rilke Variations and An Elegy for the Master...

Note:  This group of poems was also posted on Facebook...

Of the Moon, Drifting in Silence

The way that body, the moon, sublime, purposeful,
suddenly steps out over the peak,
bringing the night to serene completion.
Just so my voice rises purely
over the mountains of No More….

Rilke, The Moon,  Uncollected Poems

And she is quietly supple as well

Drifting over the black branches;

They reach for her like old women

Wanting to be released from the body.

She eases along through the pulsing stars

Like a boat for our grief;

We collect our tears in thin paper

Let them go to her and looking back

See that she has dissolved all

In the mist that accompanies her.

What permission does this give us?

To exhale our follies,

To love again.

Bell Song

Sound, no longer defined
by our hearing. As though the tone
that encircles us
were space itself expanding.

The Bell, Rilke

What is that ringing

In the thin air of the valley

The church bells are quiet

The geese have passed

On the river of knowing,

Northward to the cache of chaff

on the white prairie

Perhaps the heart is a bell

Holding the psalms of winter

Ringing out within

Or a shaded house’s interior

With its pools of yearning

shimmering outward from the center

Like the water’s mute responsiveness

To a pitched stone;

Perhaps the bell was cast

And its tongue set

From the hardening fabric

Of one leave-taking after another.

Elegy: Rilke Requited

Master and voluble one

I hear uncommon music each day

That of Bach, his great tenderness

His rich, note-flecked manuscripts

flying through the pale air

Like blackbirds aroused by

A footfall

So that an unseen violinist draws his bow

Over time’s strings,

And anguish flees with the shadows.

But you, looking out at the Tyrol

From a train to Bavaria

Your hand moving over a page

In brisk and dancing notation—

The world outside flowed into you

So that you became its voice.

Now we who are enamored of your singing

Call you Divine as Orpheus was,

In the complex oratorio of your living

How you died open-eyed,

So bravely present

And compassed to this world.

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