Let everything happen to you
As a girl I made my calves into little drinking elephants,
I would stare at the wonder of their pumping muscles,
the sup of their leg-trunks. I resuscitated a bunny once
from my cat’s electric teeth. I was on neighborhood watch
to save animals, as many as I could. My damage was easy.
My plainspoken voice is a watercolor. I’m afraid of it
as I’m afraid of what the world will do to color. I don’t
think I’ve done much. A table leans against itself
to be a table. I hold nothing but this air. I give it off.
I want a literature that is not made from literature, says Bhanu.
Last night my legs ached a low-tone. I imagined the body
giving itself up for another system. Dandelions tickling
out of my knee. The meniscus a household of worms.
It is okay to bear. My apartment hums in a Rilke sense.
A pain blooms. I am told that it’s okay to forego details
of what happened. I am told it doesn’t matter now.
I want to write sentences for days. I want days to not
be a sentence. We put men in boxes and sail them away.
Justice gave me an amber necklace. I tried to swallow
as many as I could.
Natalie Eilbert
and what she says about this poem:
“A friend recently reminded me of this Rilke poem from The Book of Hours, which begins, ‘God speaks to each of us as he makes us, / then walks with us silently out of the night.’ As a girl, I experienced traumas enough to make me feel I didn’t even exist, that I was some manifold spirit of many subjects and objects. There’s a line in the Rilke poem, ‘Let everything happen to you,’ which is both an admission and an ecstatic gesture, and I wanted this poem to capture those existential, sublime feelings alongside terror, revenge, etc. The quiet of Rilke’s poem allowed in all these things.”
~~~
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Rilke, Book of Hours, I 59
(translated by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows)
Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht, dann geht er schweigend mit ihm aus der Nacht. Aber die Worte, eh jeder beginnt, diese wolkigen Worte sind:
Von deinen Sinnen hinausgesandt, geh bis an deiner Sehnsucht Rand; gib mir Gewand.
Hinter den Dingen wachse als Brand, daß ihre Schatten ausgespannt immer mich ganz bedecken.
Laß dir alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken. Man muß nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste. Laß dich von mir nicht trennen. Nah ist das Land, das sie das Leben nennen.
Du wirst es erkennen an seinem Ernste.
Gib mir die Hand.