Sonnets to Orpheus, I, V
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Erect no mourning stone. Just let the rose
bloom as his supplication every year.
Because that's Orpheus. His metamorphosis
to this and that. We shouldn't be unclear

about other names. Once and for all times,
it's Orpheus, when there's song. He comes and goes.
Is it not enough, that he outlives the chaliced rose
sometimes, to linger on a day or two?

Oh, how he must dissolve to reach your grasp.
Even if fear seized him too, that he disintegrates.
In that his word traverses beyond presence,

he's already there, where you can't accompany him.
The lyre strings will not constrain his hands.
As he obeys, he oversteps the bounds.

Original Poem:

Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Laßt die Rose
nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn.
Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose
in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn

um andre Namen. Ein für alle Male
ists Orpheus, wenn es singt. Er kommt und geht.
Ists nicht schon viel, wenn er die Rosenschale
um ein paar Tage manchmal übersteht?

O wie er schwinden muß, daß ihrs begrifft!
Und wenn ihm selbst auch bangte, daß er schwände.
Indem sein Wort das Hiersein übertrifft,

ist er schon dort, wohin ihrs nicht begleitet.
Der Leier Gitter zwängt ihm nicht die Hände.
Und er gehorcht, indem er überschreitet.

An Archeologist Finds a Passage

I dreamt I found a planet of my own.
And now I wake to find the dream has changed
me, changed everything, suffused our lives
in streams of quantum time whose waters bled
the homeland riverbeds. The surgeon’s arc
of dawn won’t cauterize the flower heads.
I dreamt I lived alone in my own world.
And now I wake to find I do. Oh where
in sleep does twilight mine the salt of sea?
I saw you in that land of future palms
that yielded many dates to not exist,
and saw myself, as though I was before
a mirror that reflected on itself,
and never gleaned how time translates to time,
how beauty bides within a foreign script,
its hapax legomena unpronounced.
I dreamt I scrawled your name in water
backwards, with my left hand, and didn’t know
how hard the coming tide would flay the shore.
Why does slow aeolian erosion
compose its domed abodes of clocks and chimes?
My god, why? But forsake me, forgo me.
My shadow turned away from you. The reeds
are growing in my chest and in my eyes.
The photons fell in different ways for you.
And white dwarfs dissolved in cups of tea.
The light fell off the tower’s edge and crashed
into an atrium. One third a life
in twenty minutes, lived, unlived- can’t say.
I tried to touch the autumn of your face:
The moisture dripped beyond where space extends
but I distilled it, undripped, untocked.
I crossed the bridge of stolen time with you
and never learned the legend of your youth,
the pre-eternal garden speaking sleep,
or how the oak trees grew within your veins
because I missed the words, and let my breath
pass above your hair, like something being said.

I’ve walked beyond the creaking disaccords

of ghosted jamborees, far from the schoolyard…

they are still singing in the shadows

in the rustiest blue metallic twang.

In the playground’s farthest corner, there is a shade

without a name, who builds himself from clay

towards Plato’s primary sun. I analyze the geometry

of non-Euclidean trees, study the binaural scratch

of dangling leaves… the cows come for the slaughter.

It is time to leave again. The wind

blows kyries. My neck tilts on the bone.

How long has earth been dead? The poverty

fills the space between my breaths

to inhuman depths. The sound is wrong,

her voice overspun with pallor, you mustn’t go,

pale dress of milkweed and cobwebs, mustn’t go.

The porchlight, the door latch,

the breaking glass. A century later

nothing’s changed. When will we leave tonight?

The line recedes beyond the railroad tracks…

you can still follow on. Into the yellow evening

our voices chase the other echoes on.

The lemon-scented lemniscate ladens sky

with calligraphic citrus, the final fruit of infinity

pendulating among equidistributed constellations

whose penumbral palm presses the gleam

of electroluminescent green among the auroras,

the choral hymns, the antiphons of phosphenes,

omega, psi, chi, chanting back to the rapt pareidoliac

as summer’s summarium et expeditum rescinds

to primordial sums of suns and moons

and suns again. Ho-hum. Another lemma proved

inconsequential, another sequence of primes

sequestered, another series of partials

partially incomplete. Nevermind. Just take

a plane and project a map among the spheres

and on that map plot a loxodrome of milky lines,

devise clélies among the Pleiades, concoct

chiralities of cochleoids, limn a Lissajous curve

in lissome glissando, not overmuch, but enough

to sense the sonoluminescence of aleatoric time

as qualia arise within the flux of quantum foam,

within the fluidity of effluvia, the vicissitudes

becoming less viscous. It is natural to feel

afraid amidst the profligacy of rosenblooming

maps to Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Procyon.

From anabasis to katabasis, from metamorphosis

to kenosis, the chronofilaments and consiliences

hyperetherealize in a network of anastomosis.

And my arms would lean against the bronze horizon,
and build an alphabet of falling leaves. Smell the rose
with your whole body, the regenerated odors,

memorize the scents in their original order: the resin,
pine, the warmth of autumn apples blown from far off,
because everything comes from far off now
in shades of amber leaves poured unto us
like vintage wines that stop the somnolence of summer,
1909, the year that collapsed our lives to quantum time.
Oh, number these new constellations, and then reduce
once more unto the ever-prime: the toc to tic,
the Z to A, the light that moves about a word
of dark, the primal act, the apple's fall and lunar arc.

That is ideal closeness: the wind filling up our hands,

the gustatory gusts blown away against our mouths,              

the mass of words gathered up and moved

before the old taboo. Don’t ask to know

the nowhere of my face: My eyes are nothing

like the sun. My flesh is not a jade-smooth stone.
...
I will promulgate pronunciamentos, retrodict

that in my poems I spoke to you of song

through light years of scents without a source

and winds without a name; repeal the lex and law

and tell this story twice, the same
but in reverse: Be the wind when I blow

my flute for you upon your ancient airs

for lute and violin, the lightning when I strike

my drum in dusk, and strike again

as rainsticks pour through primal rites. Do you feel
me coming through, like streams of photons

of radiation that escapes its own black hole?

I have waited aeons… the light appears again.
...
The light appears and cannot fade.
But if all things have a limit, length, and law,
a lex, rex, and proud expounder, already there is nothing left
of what once was, and time itself is through with us.
Over and done. So tonight I write final lines
unto the exeunt omnes: All things come back
from the beginning, in shades of amber leaves poured unto us
through gusts that speak the words no earthly lexicons define.
Smell the rose with your whole body, the regenerated odors,
memorize the scents in their original odor:
the resin, pine, the sculpted silence grown on silence
in the gardens of repose. Everything
arrives from the middle of the field
to touch the center of being, as if we lived
and were young again, and breathed again, and felt
the sonnet's turn and planet's tilt, as if
our disembodiments of voices played hide-and-seek
amongst disappearances of sky, from sun to moon 
to sun again, from apoapsis to periapsis, 

whether my yes or your no, my no or your yes. The words
make little difference for being spoken
by the golden spirals of a thousand-petaled rose.
Forget our faces, past, and names.

Come end the human rite of shame.

Note: the trope of a woman's skin as jade is extremely common in Chinese literature and may be viewed as essentially analogous to the Petrarchan conceit of a woman's eyes as the sun.

Note further: in a musicological sense, "air" refers to a solo vocal song with instrumental accompaniment and later to certain instrumental dance suites.

This is a poem about Richard Kerwin.

Orpheus Speaks

When you left Everpeace forever I wept so much

the first time. Now with summer gone and autumn's full ascent
daylight is sieved between mint and pine. The scents
so sharp seemed to make us real, our repeated reunions,
our repeated farewells, thinning us to sun, melting us
to marmalade residuum of pure abstraction, distant
because distance is what you need to feel whole.

I wept for the taste of berries in your mouth
and for the metamorphosis of roses ever perplexed
with how to bloom, knowing how their meanings changed.

Oh, come and go. Where is your breath I held

within my throat, where is your scar my fingers traced?

Because there was song, I learned to overlive the rose
by a day. Or two. Still now it scares me to disintegrate.

And how can I sing my grief when I have no words
with you dead the second time? You were the tune
once heard upon the crossroads of systole and diastole,

where no temple to Apollo is found.¹ You sang

our lives alive. Now dead as a Roman aqueduct

your song fluxes to the sea's slumberous ear.

It's true her murmurous waterways would not listen

if my music ceased instead. You composed

the ripened tang of berries, the taste of wild blue
elderbloom. You were the winefull cup and chalice
of the earth. Now with you dead anew, the leaves
of my songbook scatter to thorn and nettle vine; I unstring
my lyre and heartstrings, untie the twain pipes of heartcore,²
and step into the twice-full stream that sweeps me
out of time, to come and go amid your lost forms.


¹Temples in ancient Greece were often located at crossroads, particularly temples to Hecate or Hermes, both of whom are associated with the underworld (the latter being the psychopomp to Hades) and with liminal states, which contrasts with the function of the sun god Apollo, who instructed Orpheus in the art of music.

²Anatomically, the aorta and venae cavae.

Il nome suo nessun saprà

The distal sun discharged some pointellated light

that dumped the graphics in his head. And bled

the world, like seeps of watercolor paint, like spume

afloat in French seascapes, where doves returned
to shore and dolphins lapped in gentle arcs, 
splashing, shooting forth, again they lashed, again

like sun-streaked artillery fire, swimming artful loops
against the linseed canvas smeared in cochineal

and violent gold, the artist's chef d'œuvre. The trash

engorged itself on phlegm and spittled air. And flared

the shock of white that thrashed his starving brain.

The stench, the stain, the bloat, the ripped-off face,

the shriveled flesh, the vomit. The piss of cats.

The bellicose swell of hunger bruised his cerebellum.

Vincerò.

The universe of blood that warmed his fingertip
converged upon the pistol grip.
The detonating sun split open his pupils

like light splittered through prismatic crystal
because he always was cut open,
slit throat to lip, splattered dry, and broken.

He breathed like an animal. No longer any sissy fag.

It wasn’t how they fell but how they flinched

that made him feel strong. It was the grandeur

that he needed. I could tell. No one else noticed,

but the bodies formed a perfect trapezoid

as the blood spooled in spirals, like the arms

of ancient galaxies, caressing a child as he cried.


Note: The title is a reference to Puccini's "Nessun Dorma."

God to Adam

So why the sudden lust for apples,

their sudden overpresence in your mind?

Perhaps it is your pride that grapples

with busting fruit, as if you were confined

to dumps of dust within the garden,

as if you mustered long for scraps, a rind,

a pit, and felt the hunger harden.

Don’t prattle pap for godly pardon.

Don’t prate about your holy hard on.

Confess your human faults and I’ll forgive

and give you clumps of clod and let you live

in hell. Sure, blame the girl and bluster

that she ensnared you in a fluster

of sin and stain and skin, while knowing
she’d blush and shake and blame the fucking snake

and never name the urge you couldn’t slake.

You fake! What appetite was growing

that bade you prance about in fig-leaved shame?

Speak, coward! Thirst for knowledge as you claim

or ache for ripened flesh? I’ll tell you what,

go find that girl and brand her primal slut

and temptress whore. Then see what lies begot:

the worm, the cut, the wound, the cankered clot.

See that? Just watch it, watch that apple rot.

Note to poem:
The words I wrote were "godly pardon."
Don't read the rhyme as "Dolly Parton."
I know it's feminine, you privileged prick.
But I'll wield a spear like any Spartan
and stick its tip into your sexist shtick.

Advice to a 13th-Century German Minnesänger

Just scorn the dawn and reap the vine. Don’t keep

concealing how the colors rage, how sunset emigrates

amid recidivistic flames that flake to scattered sea.

Not all pearls loose temporal shells to slip from lore.
Not all waves find another beach. You must break

but not too soon, you must not breach before the bay.

Recede from Grecian statues bound to sand and time,

whose feet are ripped to tide along the sepulcher of shore
before an inscribed skull whose glyphs reveal your name.

Beside your relic bones there lies a book of lyric verse

and lyres lost to Orpheus, when Eurydice died

the second time, the tune that sang his life alive.

He wept for so much melody. She caught his breath

within the falling universe, and held him out

in weaves of verse, in tomes now hushed to time.

This is your holocaust of dust, a burning book

that reads from back to front, each withered page

remade unlived, the silence desiccated twice.

Begin the legend anew tonight. Let lightning lash

from dawnwind, let it bathe manuscripts in breeze

that razes oil lamps, and bids an image enter in.

Now reconstruct the primal light. With no new words

to sing the genesis of grief, invent an alphabet

of pulsing wave on wave through waves of light.

Primeval galaxies redshift to sight. The sky appears

transduced to sifting winds through crumbling clouds

of pink and blue. Its translation is ever lost in you.

Its colors flare within the flask of everlasting light

whose depths you cannot quench. Now drink

of this desire to swallow evening’s solar green.

Now drink of this desire. Your life is overlived

but linger yet. When overladen branches bloom

in long-lapsed blue, a dreamblown memory returns.

It is the changeling sea, dissolved to babblings of foam,

who bids you slip your ear beneath her slumberous depths

and hear the speech that wanders, lost amid her forms.

Meander through the nettlebloom, and sleep

amid the poppy shade. Pluck the berries earth bestows

and taste the netherspeech. Leave a handful for the dead.

The tang speaks death into your mouth. Again and again

a ripe fullness flares upon your vine-leaf lips, and bursts

the slow namelessness that clods your sentient mouth.

Uni-verse

I.
You write a poem. You have made the universe’s ridge,

a purple turning violet, an uprisen lark bellishing in blue

jubilation, who swings a single wing against the tyrant sun

and swipes away the light. When the skylark starts to soar

it means the coming wraith of war. When the sky implodes

in rage, it means your blood dies dry on page. Hush

little poet, don’t speak a word. Under charnel vaults

not a gasp is heard. All time is silent where your corpse

rots interned. And if that risen lark should sing, just strive

within the milky edge of wing, the forge-wrought flail

of feathers flaking flames and flinging fire. The world falls

to different rebels now, as maelstroms of whitened hail

shatter air to whiter hail in shrapnelled apogee, a flash

of dawnblasted ice that lashes nerve from bone, a fresh

apotheosis of fluttered cries dissolved to sovereign sound.

II.
It is a theater of solar wind and crumbling cloud, a play

with no proscenium, no final act, and no denouement.

It is pulsing wave on wave through rushing waves

on splurging pips of particles through flowing forms

of forms on metamorphoses of gushing primal light.

It is light transformed to orange churned red by space

expanding, elselands of concealings rippling like sand

made rock turned sand again. It is a remembered time,

a half-time, a para-time, curved by the planetary poem.

It is a poem upon a plate, a pâté of poïesis, fat, fat

poïesis, a giant’s poem, a poem of rumpled plums.

Fie, fie for so much plump poïesis, fee-fie-fo-fum,

such lascivious labials, fie-fum, licentious liquids,

fee-fie, frittered plantain fricatives. Pardon, pardon

such rude and bulging blues, these rustic reds

which ought to be a famished, fusty gold. Forgive

the prinking pinks. Sorry about the orange-vermeil.