»…Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören.…«
Rainer Maria Rilke Die Erste Elegie
Archiv des Monats: April 2026
5.12.2019
somewhere – above, below – someone showers, an hour before midnight. a disruptive nonchalance born of metropolitan whim. light. light – to read and bathe in victory in the battle with time and nature, of which we are the center.
i want to trace the frenzied course of thoughts: perhaps uncover sense or meter, the obscure guidlines or a sunken path that could lead to a halfway house of logic, a ›where‹ virtuous purpose and insight live withdrawn, the end of truth as the last dusk dissolving into violets, into a ›therelessness‹ of tainted histories.
edna, dear. you rhyme still but wise and endlessly unerring.
I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.
I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
the shocks of beauty and pleasure, unwilling to remember, through even repetition become not commonplace but familiar, welcome, and awaited. and soul? the poetry sheds its lyrcism, its rhapsodic robe, reclining to a lazy prose. the lazy prose is still a child of beauty, but not of titans. the prose is patient, without madness and a mighty meter that ruptures bones of reason, grinding them into smooth piety.
at times he yawns when i commence a thought and that wicked arid seed of resentment, doubt and disappointment, buried in the ground of defeat and surrender, sprouts. i hope it will not yet, not yet spread, weed-like, as i still have the will to want to believe or convince myself – he is the last one, and maybe this is so, but not as i imagine it. the next one skulks beyond the boundaries of my fancy. so close is he to perfection that i gather up strength and crack the whip to make the defeatist sigh crawl to a yelp »Perfection!«, even if that line or circumference, that full stop of conviction and delusion, is just the dawn or the horizon.
14.11.2019
genuine. i would be content knowing it was authentic. but things from the past – they crawl in the night when consciousness stumbles around in slumber. these things invade and infect, devouring what is still good: the pure, that which is still just alive, the beautiful and the virtuous – the true.
my history is unwholesome, swollen with death and mistrust, bitter to the taste. in this space he smiles, pure as an icy mountain stream, the sky in it – blue and endless. here in this moment he keeps nothing to himself, receiving all – demanding nothing, greatful entirely in a moment beyond the horizon of expectation. suspended or moving like light, almost outside existence – a thought fragmented by the ripples of a touch.
its entirety is unbearable, like looking at the sun, like loving through pain, fear and incredulity, like wanting to fly well aware it is a daydream – yet jumping off the cliff nonetheless, to death. just to know the illusion of flight for a moment, holding hands with Bertha. crashing, emptied of regret, light with joy and relief for having awoken the fugitive hero.
not all of the creatures in the nocturnal bestiary are evil. it is not a ravenous pack, wicked, volatile or lethal. some are blissful furies raging joyously. in their delirious dance and chants they claw, scratch and deafen. my lips are cracked and crusted from the savage singalongs, a vicious wail clotted in the throat…unknowable in silence collapsing into history.
limbs torturously contort into raw primal shapes – until the body becomes a current of feeling, swelling to overwhelm all thought, all that is human and all that is escape, swallowing flesh and bone back into the beginning.
perhaps the beginning is the touch, that is genuine, without precedent or predecessors – no forethought and suspicion, no ›before‹ – alone with everyone and everything.