Rilke - 11.2

11.2

by Rainer Maria Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours, 2005

I am a city by the sea

sinking into a toxic tide.

I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown

had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It's here in all the pieces of my shame

that I now find myself again.

I yearn to belong to something, to be contained

in an all-embracing mind that sees me

as a single thing.

I yearn to be held

in the great hands of your heart --

oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,

and you, God -- spend them however you want.

Continuities

Continuities

by Walt Whitman

(from a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist)

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,

No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.

Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;

Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.

Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.

The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,

The light in the eyes grown dim, shall duly flame again;

The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;

To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,

With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

Bulbs

Bulbs

by Susan Minot

from Poems, 4 a.m., 2002

Even in the dead of winter

he is talking about bulbs.

Walking after dinner with my father.

There is snow, moonlight everywhere.

Cold. The loop is short.

We pass where he planted a hill

in the fall.

Above us stars

in the dark seed sky.

Their scattered pattern is something

we might discuss--

something he knows

from navigating boats.

I look up. It's like breathing ice.

Glitter.

My father's attention, though,

is on the knotty

wooden claws he's pressed in.

He knows where they are

below a packed layer of earth,

then all that snow above.

The tree shadows crisscross

and humps push up more sparkling white

and all he can think of,

walking with his daughter,

is bulbs.

Daffodils? I ask.

Yes, he says, this father of seven.

I planted them in clusers.

On a Tuesday Leaving

On a Tuesday Leaving

by L.L. Barkat

from here: Seedlings in Stone: The Color of Things

You think you know

the color of things-- a maple

in the back yard is gray rivers

where gray squirrels go boating

towards a blue bay...

then the world turns,

you want to run into the house,

pull somebody off the couch,

drag him (her) to see that the maple

isn't gray at all, and red squirrels

are racing to tips of bright arteries,

bleeding towards the end of day.

The Clearing

The Clearing

by Annie Dillard

from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, 1974

They came to the forest and made a clearing,

blasted the stumps, split the wood,

and built the woodshed.

Too tired

to build the house, they bought a roller,

white paint, some asphalt,

and made a tennis court in the clearing.

They forgot the fence. They played tennis

that summer till all the balls were lost

in the forest;

and when the woodshed

caught fire, it was almost as pretty

as the blaze the sparkler factory made

when it burned outside of Wheeling, West Virginia.

Evaporation Poems

Evaporation Poems

by Kathleen Norris

from Journey, 2001

1.

I would like to be as mobile as my mind

I had a religious aunt who was

(she flew out a window

into the Ideal).

So much noise:

the water in stems,

the workings of teeth,

intestines. Such

foolishness, she said,

wanting to be free

of breath's rise and fall,

wanting to be

no body.

2.

Transformation

has is price.

Do not dare to say that the water's need

is a simple one,

or that we shall all be changed.

3.

All summer I have watched the water

take whatever shape it can,

whispering "there is the past,

and the future, and between the two of them

you must be careful not to disappear."

Now I see so clearly on the days

when rain turns to snow,

how wind passes quickly

along the surfaces of things,

how calmly it probes this chilly place

where I have moved

with everything I own.

Farmer's Daughter

Farmer's Daughter

by Annie Dillard

from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, 1974

There's always unseasonable weather.

Remember the flood that killed father:

when the water went down, the chickens

lay muddy and drowned. Oh we watch

the weather here on earth; we don't forget

the winter days when girls wear cotton dresses,

the Aprils when the bushes sag with snow.

We were cutting the apple trees back

when he said, "Look, it's snowing";

but I'd seen a winter of snow

and knew that more were coming.

Still, what do we know of a season?

Only father could say

when the rain would stop at the mountain

or ruin the hay. I'd try to watch

the hawks or lick a finger,

and the crops were still a failure;

there was frost all over the valley,

south as far as Twin Hills.

He kissed me when the shadows were long

on the path to the orchard; he promised

to meet me again when the apples were in;

now when the wind parts the curtains,

now in the city when the cat won't come,

I sleep with only one eye shut,

keeping a weather eye out.