or my face pierced. I think the latter.
*
so I've been on a big Rilke kick lately, having finally found the translation of my dreams (edward snow), and though I try not to make this blog poems, poets, and poetry by Helen Vendler, I'm so stunned and breathless these days with all these beautiful words that I can't think of anything else I'd rather put across the wire.
from Black Cat
All the glances that have ever struck her
she seems to conceal about herself
so that she can look them over,
morose and menacing, and sleep with them.
But all at once, as if awakened,
she turns her face straight into her own:
and you unexpectedly meet your gaze
in the yellow amber of her round eye-stones:
trapped there like some long-extinct insect.
*
The Poet
You're withdrawing from me, you hour.
The beating of your wings leaves me bruised.
Alone: what shall I do with my mouth?
with my night? with my day?
I have no loved one, no house,
no place to lead a life.
All the things to which I give myself
grow rich and spend me.
*
My impulse is to just post the entire book, but I'm sure I'd be doing something illegal. In Rilke's turn to descriptive, or adjectival address in the first line of "The Poet," I experience one of those moments as a writer when you recognize yourself in the linguistic gesture of another, most often better, writer. It feels something like the sudden understanding in a young child that the blinking face in the mirror is them, I mean you, and that hand is your hand (albeit displaced) that you've picked up and waved at yourself. I count myself lucky to have this same cognition time after time, but still rare enough that it feels unique and urgent and makes me think that my voice belongs out there, somewhere in the thick of all those letters. Then again, maybe the smarter conclusion is that I'm beating dead horses only, and I need to go find myself a live one.
humph.