Ruminations on Rilke

I met someone who loves Rilke. I love Rilke. Can Rilke bring people together and move hearts to new, better places in the digital age? Yes, I think he can.

Below are some stanzas from Rilke that I simply had to write down. They are each their own little writing workshop on love that is honed so sharp it draws blood. I welcome anyone out there reading this to respond to some of these lines. It is good for the heart. A new way of seeing might occur. We all need new ways to see, even from windowless rooms stocked with VHS instructional tapes to improve Americans.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break

into being at your touch?

Your wholeness cascades into many shapes

You run like a herd of luminous deer

and I am dark, I am forest…

Luminous deer! Who doesn’t want to be described as that? It is beauty beyond measure. It’s a great rock band name, too, and a great visual for a large tattoo across a back of someone who lives life like a luminous deer. These people are very few in our country.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm–

you have seen it growing…

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins…

I know that nothings has ever been real

without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

That line…my looking ripens things…feels true to me in my current situation. I am looking where no other American writer has ever looked. My looking is ripening the irreality of a deadly administrative organism in American life. My looking is bearing poems that call out for a deeper look. At long last, I am learning to see.