The Regular Irregular – (Poem with Essay) Jeder Rilke ist schrecklich

 

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Hardly are there any hours

Scarcely do they ever stay

Called as if by unseen powers

This strange gift loves to stray

First, it was giddy

Tearing at tinsel

Then it was less greedy

A casual spell

Finally, I learned to see

That unwrapping is entirely unnecessary

Here all my watches blossomed

Every clock was a trade-wind

My steps were more assured

To those who’d say

That’s the mechanical way

Machines with their precision

Are no way to make decision….

Yet, I’ve turned my broken gardens into woods

Our park of long-rusted mistake into understoods

Yes

I am a regular
Irregular

Good-Day

2:16 PM on a Tuesday

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Schrecklich

I do recall it. I recall often. Or at least so often as it recalls itself. At times reconstituted from the way that summer rain brings that moisture peculiar to doors left open at twilight.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I’d have never known the name save for a friend. She was a working musician that I’d met at a party half a decade ago.

She had a small room with what I think was a red couch. On one wall there was a picture of Christ with ashen eyes and a crown of thorns. There to watch me sin. On the other a picture of Virginia Woolf to scoff at our lack of gravity. Then some jaunty looking flapper with a black sunhat in hand striking a tom boy’s ‘Jack the Lad.’

It was in that room with the smell of rain that I pulled from her shelf of books a paperback of Rilke’s. At such times that we’d separate ourselves, I’d read. So I read.

It was the introduction rather than the poems that interested me. As far as I recall they tell of a young or perhaps not so young Rilke’s struggles. The point is I at the time imagined Rilke to be about twenty-two years of age like myself.

The struggles seem to have been primarily regarding a lack of productivity. One recounted episode (if my memory serves me well) was about how Rilke would endeavor to sit every day with punctuality to write something. He’d end up doing nothing. Or so was the effect of the tale on my imagination.

The feeling it produced in me was fear. They say that the most fearsome things are unknown. But it was the familiar that struck fear deep within me.

Was my tongue forever to be stilted? Was I merely going to pass my days in such a fashion, caught between worlds, dizzy with the urgency of that which must be said, and fornicating instead? Metaphorically of course.

It did or didn’t help that Whitman was there as contrast.

Yet, I had my gravity. The thing that would pull toward creation, toward a pulse.

Though it has taken some years. I believe that I have begun to manifest the strange momentum of a chance discovery.

Entsagung

This is the meaning in whole, or part, of the regular irregular.

Thank you for reading.