After Rilke

 All is shifting liminality.

            I know this as I walk

                        and shimmering grasses caress my solitude.

They flow onwards toward the sun

            with everything glistening and gliding:

                        children’s voices, bird’s voices, wind.

Clouds are mirrors of the ocean and

            bird wings are mirrors of wind.

                        I hear a train shudder past.

Now an airplane sings overhead,

            lazily stretching its sound waves across the sky,

                        engine yawning like a cat in the sun.

Sun! Like the center of a candle it soothes me

            until a cloud covers my spotted path

                        and a sudden premonition of nighttime

sends shivers down my spine;

            a siren sounds in the distance.

                        How long must I walk without return?

There is no home any longer that I can think of

            except for the immaterial one that resides

                        inside of the void already within me,

vast as exterior night,

with little stars of memories,

dots of consciousness

amidst the slumbering vacant depths.

            I recall all the deaths in my life.

                        I recall death.

Life is perhaps more unbearable.

Where am I then?

            In what depths do I feel such things?

What vacant halls and dusty waiting rooms,

            worse even than The Trial!

                        Memorials, memorandums, and masks:

All this our daily boredom,

our daily bread

                        to bear and bear

When I am just seeking the lightness of a cloud,

             the drifting impermanence of a plane engine heard overhead

                        and the inexpressible comfort in that sound,

in grass, in it’s humility, in its patience…

            Windblown fields I have yet to meet beckon me

                        with their cradle-rockling lullabies

to solitude…

Oh, the blessed relief that only solitude can provide!

                        How much brighter the distant window of a house shines

at night!