Der Einfall, Remaining Light In Duino
[Beginning with two lines from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke]
1
'You that fall with the
thud only fruits know, unripe, '
here wait to be shaken.
Here we carry, or ought to, driven so much past
bitter root,
sugar,
not for selves but for the gods to sweeten their too
objective palates
(at least they have tongues/mouths,
we know they have teeth)
to open them into our subjectivity which, secret told, is
what they crave, our realist sufferings, such are sweet
to them, makes them, too, more solid -
what they seek - solidity beyond our capacities to reify
but for Imagination which conducts/births them into material
being.
Our extreme suffering compensates for, gravitates their
too refined coldness toward heat.
They, like scattered flour, having no leaven,
dream/desire us-the-leaven; they seek/swell
into what we have, what we bring, we, the most baked,
to be torn into, eaten, too, for yearning gods' sake.
They come/fall compelled to colors, palettes, ours, upon
worn pallets, these acrobats, as yet enfleshed lovers in
not yet felt world and literal sense, they
do balance, risk, stumble, break, stutter/cry utter such
further dimension into
desire's bodies' breath, ashes,
importantly, always just arriving
forgetting the arguing seed's
previous vertical discontentment.
2
Such skies already known
limb by limb escape
slowly their shaping.
They suspend, extend then
into their felt fall,
hard land into waking.
What uses for tears there
are gather there from
the eye, pours upon the
cheek from which miscreant
tongues may most drink.
3
Think again upon these things which go about
in darkness and stumble against us begging no
pardon, intent still on passage, confused for words
or Ibn Arabi's 'Black Light' no light at all or
thing but a gnossis found, or given.
Gnossis, most striven for, in minutest motes, is.
All this to say, Ready.
Darkness. Expand/extend
further beyond (yet into)
unsaid street corner,
into inarticulate cathedral,
into unutterable mosque,
into wholly other loci
dependent upon uninhabited
blue field, crust, what
passes for, or has, Light,
just overtones 'beyond the fiddle.'
4
Now here must stop
in what is remaining light to cook
must bend to the purple cabbage at hand,
the courage of the knife
the helpful drive of hunger,
marvel yet again, it's faceted pattern when
halved, same as the onion, the leek
Such facets in me too reveal when
I dare to be loved in two
**The quote in the poem is from the Duino Elegies
poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
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