The Sonnets to Orpheus: First Series

15

Wait...that tastes good...it's already bolting.
...Just a little music, a tapping, a hum--
Girls, you girls who are silent and warm,
dance the taste of the fruit you've been tasting.

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
how, drowning in itself, it refuses
its own sweetness. You've possessed it.
Exquisite, it's been transmuted into you.

Dance the orange. Discharge the warmer
landscape out of you so the ripe will glisten
in their native breezes! Glowing, strip

perfume from perfume. Become sisters
with the pure, resistant rind,
the juice that fills the happy fruit!

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Seattle and Whitman

"I resist anything better than my own diversity,
And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

The moth and the fisheggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place."

"I play not a march for victors only...I play great marches for conquered and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?

I also say it is good to fall...battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won."

"It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous...I make appointments with all,

I will not have a single person slighted or left away."

"Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have...for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?

Does the daylight astonish? or the early redstart twittering throught the woods?

Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I will tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you."

"Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me,

I crowd your noisiest talk by looking toward you.

Writing and talk do not prove me,

I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,

With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic.

I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,

And accrue what I hear into myself....and let sounds contribute toward me."

~from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

(A note: last summer I spent a week immersing myself in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself in Providence, RI; it was illuminating and inspiring and heart rending. In Washington last week, while visiting dear friends, I found him again. If you've never read WW because he technically is an old white dead guy, you should put that aside. He is magnificent. I know he can seem unbelievably egotistic, but he is the opposite, his great love just rolls down over us all from the page. I typed here some parts of SOM that I was just reading. Love. For those that want more concrete reporting, I may try that later on, but you can see recent pictures if you click on the flickr badge to your right.)