Major Men: Rainer Maria Rilke

TRUSTEE

for Rainer Maria Rilke

When the hinges of light
and dogs beseeched and
dead children tried to reach you,
woman too was moved as by a saint
and became your invisible maiden,

The dying, you said, are not pretentious,
and you were always dying,
lost there like a child and lover
circumspecting that pure space

that irony could not darken,
angelic like the inside of a rose,
like a mole you first entered,
tossing up earth behind you.

You to whom the Buddha
was an almond on whom
nothing any more depended,
who entered the laral realms
Of cupboards and drawers and mimicked

Spring and the open animal eyes,
you felt the climbing calm
and still knew Eve's reluctance.

Blue cornflowers gazed at you,
The Big Thing saw you at the turning;
"You must change your life," the earth said,

and the heavy fruit of your gestation
pulled you into depths,
into the microscopic;
behind things you waited
and heard the ventriloquist,
the breath for nothing,
androgynous.

This calling had no limits you knew.
Your salvos answered, spoke
the fishes' language, cried,
paced with a panther in a cage,

filled, after doldrums,
the great white canvas
and the after-birth of sonnets,

One thousand nights of love revived
and the poem became what you thought sex to be,
a festival of our competency.

You were a poet when you shaved, they said,
for against the doorpost of the everyday
you measured your autochthony

and became so like this life
the art was not your property.
Breathing through the pen
in metabolic song,
sleeping with things

and dead always in Eurydice,
these unlived lines of counterbalance
Spring need not persuade
are call-notes within.

You child in every part
replaying the convolutions,
inherent hearer of all saying,
earth's trustee.