Rilke Variation - Jenne' Andrews - Snow on Roses

Snow on Roses

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

Rilke  Book of Hours II

Suddenly the earth is holy again

covered with millions of tiny mirrors;

robed in ermine

The great Russian diva of the air

passes in her sleigh.

the trees quietly bear the snow

like corpses upright in the caisson

While it continues on across the morning,

a sifting hymn to we, who arrested

by such untouched whiteness, watch it collect

On the withered roses.

Indeed the world breaks the heart

with its alternating beauty and terror

How unseen hands make their determinations

around and through us

we who are lords of light

With our coffee and manuscripts

and then, like hybrid angels of

imminent night, work on in

the long-armed and deepening cold.

 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

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.

cc

New Rilke Variation: Of Eternity and Angels, for DVerse Open Link Night

 Take your pick-- pasting in new draft-- Rilke variation follows...xj

The Cry

A woman driving at night

Through a storm, gets out of her car

To see what lies in the road

It is a raccoon

That looks like a child

Curled around itself;

She pulls it to the roadside

by its small hands

And she drives on

Until the road becomes a lake

Of shadow beneath a white sea

Until she is in the grotto of memory

Where a polar bear surviving the floes

Staving off his hunger for another hour

Pitches himself at an enclave of walruses

For one of their calves, and gored, flung back

with a starvation cry

digs a place next to them, settling there

into the earth.

Earlier she had taken a doll from its bassinette

a doll handmade

To approximate an infant

Its eyelids closed, soft ridges

Of mohair eyelashes rooted

With a felting needle. 

She had rocked it against her emptiness

Listening to the first ice storm of the season

Lash at the trees, their sheathed leaves clattering

And gone out into the radiant snow

The first curtaining and white oblivion

Of the late autumn,

Craving the cold’s jabbing anesthesia

An Absolve Domine

Cresting in her throat.

Of Eternity and Angels

I don't care for the Christian concept of

an afterlife because of our longing for

the Beyond—it makes us less

present and earthy.

Rilke, Letters

When I thought we should live for heaven

When I was taught of eternity and angels

My imagination, so in love with red flowers

And the shadowy hips of the mountains

Resisted in the way of a tree stump

That will not submit to the axe. 

I knew the Hetaera, the courtesan within me

Even when young, of how Lady Chatterley

Met her lover in the meadow,

Too expansive in nature and will to be locked in

To a corset or a marriage.

In the folly of the flowers, I sought the rapture

Of the body and to melt into the widely pigmented

Sunset that gathered up my dreaming each night.

How we have tied one another to a forlorn distrust

of the flesh, the living that is measured

In the rich draught of each day in cascading

Leaves and the azure of the harbor where the skiffs

Linger like flames set in a blue candle.

Bogan wrote that she loved the world too much

But I wonder, is that possible, because here

In the body are all the songs we heard

When we took in our rich milk from that one

Who saw us out into the world and then,

the cross-pollination of the senses, so that

when we see the wide-winged geese

Or open to desire we are in the heavens

Of the present, with the frost-engraved

Grasses, the descending wind whose final

Purpose is to scatter our singing ashes

Like the spilled and unhulled seed.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews  2011 

New Poem: The Open-Hearted Horse

The Incomparable Egyptian Arabian Stallion Ali Saroukh, Silver Maple Farms, Santa Ynez.

The Open-Hearted Horse

With their whole gaze
animals behold the Open.
Only our eyes
are as though reversed
and set like traps around us,
keeping us inside.
That there is something out there
we know only from the creatures' countenance.

From the Duino Elegies  Rilke

There is a certain horse I pass

every evening, cutting through a stable

on a rutted right of way;

he looks out with a dark intensity

from luminous solitude

At the valley splashed in shadow under

a drifting quarter-moon.  He hears

the coyotes cry in their turning-year

fever, knows the fox-yelp

Of hunger: his galvanic haunches

ripple, and he noses the wind

singing its way in from

the Wyoming line.

The beauty of this cheval d’or

breaks my heart. Who keeps him from

his fullest self? Can no one see

he lives for coursing low

Over the fields, tail up, mane 
flying, a young and confident rider 
well up on his neck like a jockey, 
who has fed him love and apples

And said to him: show me more

of this world, this wide and tingling

bowl of yielding turf?  

Even if only in a daydream, we should 

sprint such a horse in euphoria down 

the rows of alfalfa gone to seed

For the open is a road out of
the half-lit bunker where our daily 
lives unravel and try to knit 
themselves whole again

Until the burl of dropped stitches

is left to disentangle itself in a drawer,

in the mind’s coldest room

And a lullaby to the self is really 
a psalm of yearning, how we long 
to know another living thing, to rest
our heads against it, speaking its name.

The Magnificent Majestic Noble SMF-- Silver Maple Farms.

copyright Jenne' Andrews 2011

A New Poem: The Honey-Bearer, posting for Dverse Challenge Today

Some of  you know that I have been working with lines from Rilke, writing with some of the conventions of his style-- meditative questions and statements, lines elaborating upon meanings in a somewhat formal rather than relaxed language-- this has been a very rewarding part of my writing practice;  I use the postings at A Year with Rilke, hosted by Ruth Mowry and Lorenzo Lapislazuli. Join in today's meme at DVerse Poets Pub -- to develop one's own poem based on the work of another poet.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery....he said.  I'll be sending this manuscript around and am looking for beta readers.

Also wanted to mention that this exercise is in certain respects a "palimpsest"-- to superimpose one text over another.  A number of fine writers use that technique now and then, borrowing a structure or certain conventions they see in a given poem.  xxxj

The Honey-Bearer, After Rilke

We stand in your garden year after year.
We are trees for yielding a sweet death.
But fearful, we wither before the harvest.

We Stand in Your Garden Book of Hours III, Rilke

The sweetness of death is abundant here:

See how the pumpkin splits, spills its seeds

And withers up, like a widow lingering

At a bedside

And the weakening bees, gorged

With honey, their last-minute pollination

Of the marigold.

So does the earth propagate herself again

Out of the disintegration of the late flowers

Into the mineral loam.

What then of humanity—

Are we not carried on

In our absence

By our exuberant hymns

And poignant stories,

How I have directed you

To beauty?

Have I not made you dream of birds

With my songs of the blue crane

Love horses when I have said

Look at the corralled stallion

Take his loneliness in

So that he is comforted

By a hand that knows him

And by our children

They whose faces we see at the last

Who bear forward our traits

And multiplied sorrows?

But those of us who are barren

And alone:  how do we ripen.

How does a solitary life

Come to fruition even

As it spends itself

Like a kitchen match flare

Singes the stick.

Death, my mariner

Bearer of honey’s amber stupor,

Your eye on the horizon

Your cloudy hair blowing back

If I yield to you without objection

In the way of other things

Come like shadows to maturity

Everywhere we look

Will you carry me gently

Into eternity’s avidly shimmering

Phosphor:

Will you close my eyes

With your fabled, incalculable tenderness?

For I have lived among the dark birds

Of winter

Long enough to know what you

Have to offer me

And I am tired of being afraid.

October 9 2011

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011