#torso
I never meant to fall
but sunrise greased your chassis.
The crest and fall of your jaw—
the blade and bend of it,
mudslide contouring of it—
dropped me ribless at your feet.
O promising land, crisp field
of flesh, whose fireflies
steered my eyes in the darkness—
your land, where my eyes had strayed—
scaled over eolian caves, the slick
basins of your clavicle, onto
the hexa hillocks clustered
like honeycomb chambers
on your abdomen.
I never meant to fall,
but the cursive lines of you,
I might have trod with loose eyes—
even now, there is a voice
drawing them to strike
at the aquifer beneath your waistline,
voice of vined thirst,
of torso and tug—
with them, I struck and drowned
Jul 31, 2021
Jul 31, 2021 at 4:28 AM UTC
Archaischer Torso Apollos ("Archaic Torso of Apollo")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a lamp lit from within, while his composed will
emanates dynamism. Otherwise
the firmly muscled abdomen could not beguile us,
nor the centering ***** make us smile
at the thought of their generative animus.
Otherwise the stone might seem deficient,
unworthy of the broad shoulders, of the groin
projecting procreation's triangular spearhead upwards,
unworthy of the living impulse blazing wildly within
like an inchoate star—demanding our belief.
You must change your life.
Herbsttag ("Autumn Day")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.
Der Panther ("The Panther")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
His weary vision's so overwhelmed by iron bars,
his exhausted eyes see only blank Oblivion.
His world is not our world. It has no stars.
No light. Ten thousand bars. Nothing beyond.
Lithe, swinging with a rhythmic easy stride,
he circles, his small orbit tightening,
an electron losing power. Paralyzed,
soon regal Will stands stunned, an abject thing.
Only at times the pupils' curtains rise
silently, and then an image enters,
descends through arrested shoulders, plunges, centers
somewhere within his empty heart, and dies.
Komm, Du ("Come, You")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
This was Rilke’s last poem, written ten days before his death. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium, of leukemia and its complications. I had a friend who died of leukemia and he was burning up with fever in the end. I believe that is what Rilke was describing here: he was literally burning alive.
Come, you—the last one I acknowledge; return—
incurable pain searing this physical mesh.
As I burned in the spirit once, so now I burn
with you; meanwhile, you consume my flesh.
This wood that long resisted your embrace
now nourishes you; I surrender to your fury
as my gentleness mutates to hellish rage—
uncaged, wild, primal, mindless, outré.
Completely free, no longer future’s pawn,
I clambered up this crazy pyre of pain,
certain I’d never return—my heart’s reserves gone—
to become death’s nameless victim, purged by flame.
Now all I ever was must be denied.
I left my memories of my past elsewhere.
That life—my former life—remains outside.
Inside, I’m lost. Nobody knows me here.
Liebes-Lied ("Love Song")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
How can I withhold my soul so that it doesn’t touch yours?
How can I lift mine gently to higher things, alone?
Oh, I would gladly find something lost in the dark
in that inert space that fails to resonate until you vibrate.
There everything that moves us, draws us together like a bow
enticing two taut strings to sing together with a simultaneous voice.
Whose instrument are we becoming together?
Whose, the hands that excite us?
Ah, sweet song!
Das Lied des Bettlers ("The Beggar's Song")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch
I live outside your gates,
exposed to the rain, exposed to the sun;
sometimes I’ll cradle my right ear
in my right palm;
then when I speak my voice sounds strange,
alien...
I'm unsure whose voice I’m hearing:
mine or yours.
I implore a trifle;
the poets cry for more.
Sometimes I cover both eyes
and my face disappears;
there it lies heavy in my hands
looking peaceful, instead,
so that no one would ever think
I have no place to lay my head.
Excerpt from “Loneliness”
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Being alone and apart is like the rain
ascending at evening from alien plains:
from lonely plateaus, unseen and unsought, it climbs
toward heaven, its sublime ancient home,
and only, when fallen, pities the city.
This is my translation of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912, as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.
First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!
And so I restrain myself, swallowing the sound of my pitiful sobbing.
For whom may we turn to, in our desire?
Not to Angels, nor to men, and already the sentient animals are aware
that we are all aliens in this metaphorical existence.
Perhaps some tree still stands on a hillside, which we can study with our ordinary vision.
Perhaps the commonplace street still remains amid man’s fealty to materiality—
the concrete items that never destabilize.
Oh, and of course there is the night: her dark currents caress our faces ...
But whom, then, do we live for?
That longed-for but mildly disappointing presence the lonely heart so desperately desires?
Is life any less difficult for lovers?
They only use each other to avoid their appointed fates!
How can you fail to comprehend?
Fling your arms’ emptiness into this space we occupy and inhale:
may birds fill the expanded air with more intimate flying!
Yes, the springtime still requires you.
Perpetually a star waits for you to recognize it.
A wave recedes toward you from the distant past,
or as you walk beneath an open window, a violin yields virginally to your ears.
All this was preordained. But how can you incorporate it? ...
Weren't you always distracted by expectations, as if every event presaged some new beloved?
(Where can you harbor, when all these enormous strange thoughts surging within you keep
you up all night, restlessly rising and falling?)
When you are full of yearning, sing of loving women, because their passions are finite;
sing of forsaken women (and how you almost envy them)
because they could love you more purely than the ones you left gratified.
Resume the unattainable exaltation; remember: the hero survives;
even his demise was merely a stepping stone toward his latest rebirth.
But spent and exhausted Nature withdraws lovers back into herself,
as if lacking the energy to recreate them.
Have you remembered Gaspara Stampa with sufficient focus—
how any abandoned girl might be inspired by her fierce example
and might ask herself, "How can I be like her?"
Shouldn't these ancient sufferings become fruitful for us?
Shouldn’t we free ourselves from the beloved,
quivering, as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that in the snap of release it soars beyond itself?
For there is nowhere else where we can remain.
Voices! Voices!
Listen, heart, as levitating saints once listened,
until the elevating call soared them heavenward;
and yet they continued kneeling, unaware, so complete was their concentration.
Not that you could endure God's voice—far from it!
But heed the wind’s voice and the ceaseless formless message of silence:
It murmurs now of the martyred young.
Whenever you attended a church in Naples or Rome,
didn't they come quietly to address you?
And didn’t an exalted inscription impress its mission upon you
recently, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa?
What they require of me is that I gently remove any appearance of injustice—
which at times slightly hinders their souls from advancing.
Of course, it is endlessly strange to no longer inhabit the earth;
to relinquish customs one barely had the time to acquire;
not to see in roses and other tokens a hopeful human future;
no longer to be oneself, cradled in infinitely caring hands;
to set aside even one's own name,
forgotten as easily as a child’s broken plaything.
How strange to no longer desire one's desires!
How strange to see meanings no longer cohere, drifting off into space.
Dying is difficult and requires retrieval before one can gradually decipher eternity.
The living all err in believing the too-sharp distinctions they create themselves.
Angels (men say) don't know whether they move among the living or the dead.
The eternal current merges all ages in its maelstrom
until the voices of both realms are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, the early-departed no longer need us:
they are weaned gently from earth's agonies and ecstasies,
as children outgrow their mothers’ *******
But we, who need such immense mysteries,
and for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's progress—
how can we exist without them?
Is the legend of the lament for Linos meaningless—
the daring first notes of the song pierce our apathy;
then, in the interlude, when the youth, lovely as a god, has suddenly departed forever,
we experience the emptiness of the Void for the first time—
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and aids us?
Second Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,
one of the soul’s lethal raptors, well aware of your nature.
As in the days of Tobias, when one of you, obscuring his radiance,
stood at the simple threshold, appearing ordinary rather than appalling
while the curious youth peered through the window.
But if the Archangel emerged today, perilous, from beyond the stars
and took even one step toward us, our hammering hearts
would pound us to death. What are you?
Who are you? Joyous from the beginning;
God’s early successes; Creation’s favorites;
creatures of the heights; pollen of the flowering godhead; cusps of pure light;
stately corridors; rising stairways; exalted thrones;
filling space with your pure essence; crests of rapture;
shields of ecstasy; storms of tumultuous emotions whipped into whirlwinds ...
until one, acting alone, recreates itself by mirroring the beauty of its own countenance.
While we, when deeply moved, evaporate;
we exhale ourselves and fade away, growing faint like smoldering embers;
we drift away like the scent of smoke.
And while someone might say: “You’re in my blood! You occupy this room!
You fill this entire springtime!” ... Still, what becomes of us?
We cannot be contained; we vanish whether inside or out.
And even the loveliest, who can retain them?
Resemblance ceaselessly rises, then is gone, like dew from dawn’s grasses.
And what is ours drifts away, like warmth from a steaming dish.
O smile, where are you bound?
O heavenward glance: are you a receding heat wave, a ripple of the heart?
Alas, but is this not what we are?
Does the cosmos we dissolve into savor us?
Do the angels reabsorb only the radiance they emitted themselves,
or sometimes, perhaps by oversight, traces of our being as well?
Are we included in their features, as obscure as the vague looks on the faces of pregnant women?
Do they notice us at all (how could they) as they reform themselves?
Lovers, if they only knew how, might mutter marvelous curses into the night air.
For it seems everything eludes us.
See: the trees really do exist; our houses stand solid and firm.
And yet we drift away, like weightless sighs.
And all creation conspires to remain silent about us: perhaps from shame, perhaps from inexpressible hope?
Lovers, gratified by each other, I ask to you consider:
You cling to each other, but where is your proof of a connection?
Sometimes my hands become aware of each other
and my time-worn, exhausted face takes shelter in them,
creating a slight sensation.
But because of that, can I still claim to be?
You, the ones who writhe with each other’s passions
until, overwhelmed, someone begs: “No more!...”;
You who swell beneath each other’s hands like autumn grapes;
You, the one who dwindles as the other increases:
I ask you to consider ...
I know you touch each other so ardently because each caress preserves pure continuance,
like the promise of eternity, because the flesh touched does not disappear.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of initial intimacy,
the first lonely vigil at the window, the first walk together through the blossoming garden:
lovers, do you not still remain who you were before?
If you lift your lips to each other’s and unite, potion to potion,
still how strangely each drinker eludes the magic.
Weren’t you confounded by the cautious human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Weren’t love and farewell laid so lightly on shoulders they seemed composed of some ethereal substance unknown to us today?
Consider those hands, how weightlessly they rested, despite the powerful torsos.
The ancient masters knew: “We can only go so far, in touching each other. The gods can exert more force. But that is their affair.”
If only we, too, could discover such a pure, contained Eden for humanity,
our own fruitful strip of soil between river and rock.
For our hearts have always exceeded us, as our ancestors’ did.
And we can no longer trust our own eyes, when gazing at godlike bodies, our hearts find a greater repose.
Keywords/Tags: Rilke, translation, German, elegy, elegies, angels, beauty, terror, terrifying, desire, vision, reality, heart, love, lovers, beloved, rose, saints, spirits, souls, ghosts, voices, torso, Apollo, Rodin, panther, autumn, beggar
Nov 2, 2020
Nov 2, 2020 at 2:30 AM UTC
nonchalantly, and with a nimble stride, the lizard crossed my path
at great speed, it's tailless torso, made it to the cover of desert cactus
the momentum of this little creature was stunning
the desert floor is packed with amazement of all kinds
Brian Hill - 2020 # 167
Jun 19, 2020
Jun 19, 2020 at 9:38 AM UTC
A turn of the torso in the hall
Be it to look back or forward
Past or beyond the past
Is not necessarily wrong at all
Unless of course the owner of the turn
Is twisting therein arrogance
Or with an unsettling voice
Which demeans all others in the hall
But if such a twisting diaphragm can actually sing
Then arrogance is more all the more tolerable
And not so much a problem at all
Because the sound will be beautiful
Even if the character is not beautiful at all
Mar 30, 2017
Mar 30, 2017 at 1:39 PM UTC
The material was stretched tight
deep furrows in the red and black
pulled across your shoulder blades so severely
but you were all soft edges.
The blunt edge of a 2B pencil
gently shadowing in the crease
where stomach met hip bones
and warm.
It was lovingly done.
Mar 30, 2016
Mar 30, 2016 at 4:10 PM UTC
I slept soundly that night as I
Huddled in my blanket of tightly
Knitted flesh, skin so
Soft,
Silky,
Patches
Of a hundred souls touching
My body, each a moment of death
Forever touching another, held together
With silken twine.
I lay on my torso, it is so soft, to rest a weary head,
No ribs do stick or protrude,
All taken from this form now
Delicately comforting my head,
I use not geese feathers,
But that of the
Finest,
Curly,
Hair,
So tightly held, washed to silk smoothness
As they tenderly hold my sleeping slumber.
I have moments of sorrow, as I look behind,
A head board of white,
It is cold as death, but It shows the beauty attained by
Oblivion, the passed resting as one above my head.
I maybe called a monster, but in death is sleep
For the dead now slumber with me,
I hear their souls curse me, voices
Radiating,
Screaming,
Violating
My thoughts, but this is my time,
As each I fed upon, there tortured souls.
There anguish feeds me, and when I am
Consumed within them,
I once again rest. Comforted
By sleeping upon the dead
They touch me like no living could do,
I have another blanket to sew,
Yes it must be peeled while you still breath,
But your torso is so soft, maybe time for a new pillow.
Mar 30, 2015
Mar 30, 2015 at 7:46 PM UTC
froths in lichen:
gushing on its bark,
it looks like pollen
was smeared on in
yellow gouache,
ulcers spread to lick
on to each branch.
I let it take over
in the way you
spread your arms
over bed and torso,
in the way your kiss
through the mornings
paint my cheeks red.
Aug 14, 2014
Aug 14, 2014 at 9:54 PM UTC
I love all parts of you just as I love you as a whole.
Your eyes are not your eyes.
They are nets for light,
catch-all-that-catch-can,
and catch they do.
Your nose is not a nose.
It is line and curve
in your silhouette;
Immediately recognizable
and just as soon loved.
Your skin is not skin.
It is flat and rolling prairie.
It is not porcelain, but pocked,
scarred and lovely.
Sand on the beach that begs to be touched.
Your hair is not hair.
It is thick forest
Dark and deep.
When I run my fingers through,
I cannot help the rush of comfort.
Your legs are not legs,
They are crooked columns
of tendon and muscle,
cartilage and bone.
They carry you to me.
Your arms are not arms.
They are air.
Strong as wind when wrapped around,
and soft as a breeze when alighting on skin.
Your torso is not a torso.
It is a trunk.
Solid and beautiful.
You are my tree and I lean against you.
Your mouth is not a mouth.
It is a cave,
Dark but warm
and full of secrets.
Your hands are not hands.
They are mirror twins,
Machines that create and destroy.
And the ring on your finger is not a ring.
It is the invisible oath;
the promise that hangs in the air
and binds you to me.
May 8, 2014
May 8, 2014 at 1:39 AM UTC