I have decided to write about the first poem I see when I open my book. The book is Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Prose and Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. The book is silver and sea green. The pages are creamy. The type is black. Each left-hand page contains entirely German, each right-hand page, English. They are different poems, but the English ones are born of the German. They are relatives, perhaps, but not twins. I will never fully understand the meaning of the left-hand pages. Also, I will never fully understand the meaning of the right-hand pages. We will never fully understand each other. And that is okay. I am tired of thinking. I am tired of analyzing and dissecting and understand and knowing. For now, I would like four thousand words of reaction, where I only have to see and immediately offer the jumbled contents of my mind, without entirely justifying or explaining them.
I love poetry, because I do not have to think-- an idea, which, perhaps, is contrary to most people's concept and experience of poetry, itself. So many people shudder at my love for poetry. I can't understand it, they say. I don't know all that stuff about rhyme, they say, as if poetry were all understanding and rhyme. Poetry is a moment. It is words, which I might not read systematically. I often start at the end, skipping upward through the stanzas, to the beginning. Sometimes I do not make it that far. Each word is a poem.
I collect some number of words into my mind, some arrangement, which the author perhaps did not intend, and this is my poem. This is my experience. They make a feeling. I do not have to understand why or how. Nothing so structured as rhyme scheme or meter registers in my consciousness. Poetry is shallow for me.
This is beautiful, not unfortunate.
The words sit on my face, in my mouth. I can feel them. Literally. The movement of each letter-- its curves and dips and angles-- offers me an emotion. I do not search for justification or reason.
I can taste words. I can touch them.
A woman comes into my restaurant, wearing a name tag for a synesthesia association. I can taste her name. Susan.
I wonder if music is colorful for her, or sounds, delicious.
When I eat, I do not have to ask myself why I enjoy the experience. I simply put the food in my mouth. Chew. Swallow. It is a fleeting and precious moment.
I eat poetry. Each word is a poem. Each word is a morsel. I will bite each one and simply let my taste buds respond. They decide for me the flavor of each word.
This might seem, so far, an extravagant, extended metaphor. I intend it, however, to be no metaphor. Words are tangible to me. I can taste them. Now I will open the creamy pages of Rilke's words and react. Taste.
I open to the same page as always. Page 91. Ahead of All Parting seem intent upon being eternally open to this moment, despite my desire to find new words. Perhaps every page in this book is page ninety-one. It contains a segment from a poem, which stretches across many pages. The title is "Requiem for a Friend." The translation, however, is inadequate. Rilke's original is "für eine Freundin." Such a word is inexpressible in English. I cannot tell you my friend is a woman without inserting some unintended word. Requiem for a Female Friend does not roll off the tongue so easily. Requiem for a Woman ignores the fact that she is dear to me. She is, she was.
I will not think about this though, because I have opened to page 91, which is not the title page, and these words are, in themselves, a poem. This brief stanza is its own entity. In my journal, you might see written down these same lines.
For this is wrong, if anything is wrong: not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon. We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
I have ignored Rilke's lines breaks. I have ignored the line breaks of Stephen Mitchell, who has translated Rilke's word here. Right now this poem is mine. One might call this plagiarism, but in reality these words are now mine. They are a moment, which is my own cold feet tucked under my body and a thick swell in my throat, which feels something like grief and something like joy. The words are crammed into my esophagus and I can literally not decided whether to swallow or vomit.
Aside from death, my thoughts are predominantly occupied with letting go.
It is the first time I've ever been in Berkeley, and I am lying on a queen-sized bed in the Claremont hotel, pressing my headphones into my skull. I listen to this song on repeat. Never Let Go, it is called. Taylor gave it to me. Whenever I am worried or scared, Taylor tells me to listen to this song and I can know that he will love me. He sings and pays his glossy black piano and I feel both safe and anxious at the same time. I want to vomit his song. It is in my throat, like Rilke's words.
Taylor is my best friend right now, maybe my only friend my senior year of high school, and I think that if I could just hold onto him and never stop that everything would be okay. Then I would not have to worry about losing him.
He promises me that he will always love me, but I despise promises and ask him never to say such things to me because promises are inevitably disappointments. Always. My whole face aches in thinking about promises.
The reality of my skepticism about promises is affirmed when you (yes, you) tell the class that the German word for promise is versprechen, which possesses an inherent aspect of falsity. One spricht ver, if such a thing were possible. One speaks erroneously. But should we extract the ver, the deceitful element, and leave only the sprechen, then one would merely be speaking and not making promises, which is precisely the problem. One cannot speak and make promises, without inherently being false. Promises are lies, however sincere the speaker may wish to be,
In other words, we must always let go, despite the loving pledge of Taylor's song.
His voice cuts off in the middle of the chorus. Ironically he sings "it never ends and." And then it ends. The song clips off abruptly, into this robust, mocking silence. He tells me he will give me the finished version, but it does not happen before we fight and distance ourselves to the point of not speaking.
I have no spoken with him in eight months.
Requiem für einen Freund.
"Love means being alone," Rilke says, mocking me. He knows that I cannot help but love and that my deepest fear is being alone.
He tells me my greatest joy and most horrific fear are the same thing.
Lieben heisst allein sein. The German form offers a beautiful consonance. Seemingly contrary to my opening statements, which laud a thoughtless, rash relationship with the words, I cannot help but see this device. The sound is so delicious, though; it is a simple taste, not a thought. He inverts the "ie" sound-- the sound of love-- and leaves me with the "ei" of solitude. It dominates each word, taunting me with how unlike love it is, how it is the exact opposite of what I want and yet is the inevitable residue of that very thing. The opposite of love follows love itself. Hate is not the antithesis of love by any means. It is just as full, just as passionate and intense and wild as love. To be hated is to be cared about; someone is occupied with emotion toward you. Loneliness is the true opposite of love. Vacant space. Nothingness.
Love means being alone. Love requires letting go. Requiem for a friend.
He provides so little white space to contemplate this solitude, not a minute to absorb the intensity of his words. Instead the pages are crammed with letters, with their shapes, with curves and arches and lines and dots. As long as I keep filling my mouth with words, I will not be able to name this loneliness. I will be too filled with other sounds to taste and pronounce its presence.
Poetry is making me insane. I feel incapable of forming cohesive ideas. I must keep swallowing. Literally, I swallow and I swallow. Scraping the sides of my mouth with my tongue in order to gulp it all down. My frantic swallows intensify to a point, where I feel that I am consuming my mouth itself. I would like anything to keep me from throwing up. Poetry makes me want to vomit. I love it. I love the madness and the repulsion that I experience.
I hate Rilke. I am feeling frantic. This hatred is the same thing as loving him. In the background, I have classical music, which intensifies my lack of control. I hate writing four thousand words, because I prefer less than one hundred at a time. I prefer short poems. I prefer short stories. I prefer brevity. Nothing that promises more than what I can consume in one glance. I want only what I can see on one page. Only that I will read. Only that I will produce. This will be forty one-hundred-words. Sometimes I have trouble making sense.
Here begins the eighteenth bath of one hundred words. My computer tells me I have composed exactly one thousand eight hundred two words. Eintausendachthundertzwei. I prefer German, which allows me to condense three separate English words into one entire word. I prefer nearness. I prefer not letting go. I would like everything to be touching. All the words to be one, without limit, like the German's. No one has ever told them that their words must end somewhere. Instead they can grow and compound illimitably. Love means being alone. Rilke utters Kindgewesensein and Stephen Mitchell divorces the intimate word into having been a child. One becomes four. Separation is inevitable. If I only truly knew German, four thousand words could extend limitlessly. Each word would be hundreds of individual pages, each sentence, thousands. The four thousand could never end. I would not stop to care whether it made sense as long as it kept moving, as long as it filled space and time and sound. As long as I could hear. But English is so sharp and brief. Each word must be split into pieces. We will never remain friends. My cynicism finds justification in the space between words. Everything falls apart. Everyone moves away. Love only breaks.
I am afraid of being alone.
Perhaps my love for language lies in its unfaltering accessibility. Unlike the most unconquerable distance between myself and old friends, old loves, I can easily reach into the most dark recesses of my mind and recover neglected words. They are incapable of truly abandoning me, as I might, at any moment, open my massive Oxford English Dictionary and retrieve them. I find the most joy in perusing the pages of the dictionary, with its honest black print and the purpose of each word offered willingly beside its face. The dictionary is my catalog of friends. I might call upon each one at any time with no resistance. They are waiting in rows to greet me.
And the poem. The poem is such an attractive display of friends. A photograph, an invitation, an offering.
My metaphors are conflicting, as words are now both edible and allies. I do not eat my friends, yet this possibility may be the allure of language. It is precisely whatever I want it to be. It says what I want and rarely disappoints me. If i am unsure of a meaning, a connotation, a pronunciation, the dictionary always awaits me. Its pages will tell me simply. There are no lies, no promises. I have nothing to lose.
Practice only this: letting go.
Exactly one year ago, I allowed myself to trust someone, whose curves and tastes were not that of a word. November seventeenth two thousand three. Zweitausenddrei. Rather than literary, the experience was human. He had his own mouth, his own words, how own poems on his tongue. I kissed it once and I forgot to be scared.
I am afraid these words will become stupid. I will begin blathering about boys and kissing and being nervous. I am a thirteen year old girl, when I remember this experience. But it was poetry. Our love was poetry. Please let me tell you.
I had a fear of knowing more than his face, which I saw. I was afraid of looking into the pages of his skull to read his meaning, his pronunciation, of reading in those lines that he was merely a show-- that the beauty of experiencing him superficially could not be sustained in knowing him internally. I was afraid of being disappointed. Should he be less than I felt with my eyes. I risked this, however, and found my doubts to be pleasantly unnecessary. From the very discovery of his name (Diogo), his meaning exceeded the beauty of his face. This relationship grew on words-- not a careless explosion of them, but a sincere, tender exchange. Oh! My heart clenches at the though of it.
I realize now that I fell in love because he spoke. He offered me words with thought and meaning. Never was a word merely a vacancy with nothing behind it. Every moment had depth. I have trusted words first and foremost in my life and should one use them correctly, they will, in fact, be my trust. Not have it. But be it.
And so Diogo is.
He is my trust.
I am looking at his name on the page. It seems stark with that capital D, so formal and closed. diogo is not closed. He is unending. And yet my trust is gone. It is in Brazil. It has gone away and taken a large piece of me with it.
He burrowed most deeply inside me, because he knew precisely how to speak my language-- one, which is both audible and implied. It is a method of usage, a sound, a pace, a lifestyle. diogo carries a dictionary with him at all times. Together our speech was a poem; we found a rhythm, a meter, which began at either end of a line and ran to meet itself and unite in the middle. Two halves of a certain poetic line. I had never been in love before, and when I found him, it was a poem.
On June 29, 2004, at 11:58 pm, these words came in the absence of my trust.
i expect
in the middle of
the
long, wiry
middleless
night
to
feel your skin
arch into the
spaces
left gaping
behind my
knees and in
the fold of my
belly
left gaping
by the night
by you
by the middleless
stretch
which refuses to
peak and
then
descend
but rather
climbs
endlessly
toward yours
unreachable
knees
which will
bend into
mine
and clot the
spaces
which
the spaces
which are
letting everything
fall
apart as it
rises
and scatters like
escaped
balloons--
formless
and without
end.
My trust is a bouquet of red balloons, which float distantly and eventually will choke fish in the ocean with their withered, latex corpses. I can hear my poetry teacher asking me why red, why red. One can never simply insert colors or adjectives without them having some very significant meaning. Should I simply feel like having my trust be a red balloon, it wold only confuse and mislead the reader. diogo, you are red like the sheets on my bed and my torn paper lantern and my non-drip candles and my nose when I cry. You are red, because that is simply the color I feel like ascribing to you at this moment.
Here I realize that my sanity has dissipated completely. It seems that I cannot maintain a single vein of thought, and yet the truth is these words are all a unified idea for me. I began with a poem and have arrived at a relocated love, from which I will never recover. These are the same experience for me. Poetry, love, taste, loss, time, shapes, fear, separation, insanity. I read because I do not have to think, but can simply access the fragile places inside of me. They are so easily called to surface, where I can witness but not examine them. And I can put them away with a closed book, or I can try.
I speak of how poems are so ephemeral and superficial for me, how they are bite-sized items. With some though, I cannot escape the taste. diogo's sound will never leave my mouth. Rilke will constantly be waiting beneath my tongue. I will never get away from any of this. One will say ostensible and tine and pith and ten-penny and I will never escape the meaning of those words. It is a meaning, not in dictionaries, but one I found in him, in a person. Nothing is okay, because I cannot escape words. They never go away. They will constantly remind me.
I wrote some on my back, which are important. Bist du mit der vollständiger Rüstung der LIEBE bekleidet, kann menschlicher Hass dich nicht erreichen. Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you. Clad in the panoply of Love. People read my back-- its freckled white page-- and pronounce panoply as if it were panopoly. Like Monopoly. Like a game, where one buys tiny property cars and green and red houses. When someone says it correctly, I know they are mine. They have heard me. It does not matter that they do not necessarily understand. They have heard something in me. Panoply. Armor. My last name is pronounced Lost. er. Like Lobster without a b, my mother's voice repeats on the phone endlessly, the same line for every caller. I am not Loast-er, like toaster. I am not loast, but lost. Lost. I am lost, thank you for saying it correctly. Her name is Maureen. My mother is Maureen, which the phone also garbles. People look for Marine, Mowreen, Mary Ann. They do not know my mother. When they call asking for Marine Loaster, their distance is apparent. They have voiced and exposed their falsity. I tell them, she is not home.
These are the words, which are important to me.
I have a dream one night that someone is trying to hurt me. I am naked. Armored though, my tattoo spreads across my entire body to protect me. I wake up feeling safe. The words have kept me safe.
My eyes are crying now, independent of my desire to maintain physical, in the absence of mental, composure. Entire poems are coming out of my eyes. They will never truly disappear though, only be recycled. Evaporate and return through the water I sip before bed. A cool glass of poetry to put me to sleep. I can hold onto words. They hold onto me. The relationship is torturous and beautiful. I love to read. I love to write. I can taste words. I love the taste.
Rilke says I need to practice letting go. He has written these words for me. No one else can see them. He has left this entire book of poetry only for me, open to page ninety-one. Seite einundneunzig, where Requiem for a Friend is shouting the same ugly words to me. They are so beautiful and ugly. Let go. Let go. Let go.
let go!
Rilke whispers now. let go, let go letgo letgoletgoletgoletgo...
He does not need to yell anymore, he does not even speak, because I can hear him without any words being exchanged at all. They were created to define and communicate our reality, but have assumed a life of their own. Words transcend all existence, the world itself. Words are the world. It is all garbled in my mind. I only want to hold on to my loves, my idea, my vein, my point, my hope, the promise, the song, my tears, each word. If I can just hold on and not think too much, I will be okay. Let go. let go let go let go.
My ultimate sense of security, of stability, consistency, understanding-- these stupid words-- begin to blur. They seem senseless. letgolet go let go let go let gogogogo go go let go let go beth let go i've pushed myself so long, i do not want to capitalize anymore, i do not want to have punctuation or subjects or predicates or even spaces. i just want to let go and stop feeling, i don't want words to exist anymore. they only hurt me. they hurt. let go let go. please, let go
(To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings.)
