New Poem: Rilke Variation, for DVerse Open Link Night

Orpheus, Imploring  -  August Rodin

Thinking of Rilke on All Hallows Eve

Oh, the pleasure of it, always emerging

New from the loosened clay.  Those who

dared to come first had hardly any help.

Nevertheless cities arose on sun-favored

coasts, and pitchers filled with water

and oil…...

We are endlessly offered into

life: all time is ours. And what any one

 of us might be worth, death alone knows—

and does not tell.

Sonnets to Orpheus II

I do not meet you on the sun-favored coast

But in the Tuscan cypress at twilight

Where you walked alone, song stirring in you

Your hands at your sides.

When I first heard you calling from the page

I thought who is it that emerges

From the loosened clay

Of the underworld

Alive—a fellow seer and traveler

An Orpheus and Dante, brave interrogator

Out of the infernos of loneliness;

My vagabond heart went out

Into the forest crepuscule and saw how pale

You were, kneeling over a gravestone;

Behind the century’s curtain do you too

Bear witness to the pas de deux

Of the Gemini, two stars

in conjoined burning;

Did you as well, conjuring a Eurydice

of the garden,

dream of a counterpart?

And I knew you as both brother and lover

In language and spirit

In the kinship of deprivation, when I heard

That your mother incarnated

A lost daughter in you;

That is the Prufrockian infamy

We endured together:

How it was when we were small,

Vulnerable, and the profaned world

Slipped the axis of our sensibility.

Beloved to me is our unaccountable

Intimacy before the unseen:

And that we are each afflicted

With inner music sustains me now

As like you at the end, I am at odds with time

Striving to lend my voice and to stir those

Encountering my declarations.

If we could remake each other from wet clay

Reincarnate those we have lost

But instead lyrical volleys

Reverberate like bells peak to peak

And the passing grief-stricken moon

Yearns to stay behind to unite and

Succor us in the milk of her light. 

Rilke, as many poets before him, was captivated by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  In many respects his work reveals his own unfulfilled quest for a Eurydice wooed by his singing into his arms.  He reinvents the myth in that Eurydice rises from death and imbues the natural world so that he senses her everywhere—a risen Eve, in a sense and a metaphor for the extent to which Rilke felt that world calling to him, evoking response from him.  In this poem I am trying to comprehend Rilke's pull on me rather than writing for a wider audience but I hope that others feel kinship with it.

Rilke was, in our terms today, the victim of child abuse; his mother, mourning a lost infant daughter, dressed him in girls' clothing for a time.  

My allusion to Prufrock of course refers to the great poem The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock of T.S. Eliot—a maimed and alienated modern persona also thwarted in a quest for intimacy, and who sees carnal/romantic love as linked to meaning and fullness of being.

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Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011