You Broke My Heart

I was thinking of some of the messages Rilke will never receive:

— dentist called abt your appt tomorrow

— don’t forget to pick up the olives

— your dry cleaning’s ready

Little post-it notes of infinity, these outcast scraps of mortal

annoyances, fevers, artifacts, whispers and receipts were never

allowed near his poetry. When one is on “the path from inner

intensity to greatness”, one doesn’t collect coupons, worry about

toxic waste or pay attention to laundry. Rilke quarantined

himself from the sickness of money, the psychic germs

associated with the handling of money, the inglorious detritus

of veterinary bills, money squalls, anything remotely domestic.

This contamination he left largely to the phalanx of servants

employed by his aristocratic patrons, left the unsavory details

of money and credit cards for the rest of us to wallow in.

Rilke, you broke my heart on page 370

of Life of a Poet, when you called the writer Franz Werfel

“Jew-boy” — a faceless taunt — stupid, ignorant,

product of your time? a burr. stick. cudgel. abyss.

It’s true, no one really knows how to live. I don’t know

how to live. I don’t know if redemption is possible, something

inside us like flowering, a kind of leakage, spillway over

rough concrete dam where a life washes outside its fixed

habits and resistance, its gaping absences, abscesses, horrible

mistakes, petty avoidances. I don’t know if this life will be

enough to make me wise. I don’t know if I can wake up.

I can only carry everyone with me, ferry every atom

like a fire brigade, like an ant. Rilke, am I carrying

you or are you carrying me? Readers are transitive,

are bound material, are more faithful than lovers.

You’ve been working on your after-life epic

through us, through stones, through bees, traffic,

through digital flickering, where you inhabit every

far-flung human aspect of buying, selling, trading

and also every non-human aspect. You’re a free man.

Your poems are clouds, are economists, are ladders

— courting contamination, reveling in it as though

it were a field of thick, cadmium-yellow sunflowers.

Source: Rewild (Tupelo Press, 2022)