——–Frida Baumgartner was housekeeper to Rilke from 1921 to 1926 at Muzot.
Dear Rose,
From his balcony, the night sky is a portal to a pinhole
of other lives—some barely visible. As if what is remembered grows
far away. This is the way life is: You are always here on hard soil
and what you want is north or south of you. Sometimes I think death
is a sky so black we leave all our lives behind.
I don’t want to forget the touch of sun burning the backs of my hands
as I cradle petals grown loose from their bodies. I inhale a rose that is more
than this red becoming. I don’t want to leave that perfect shadow of being
and not being in the world.
Sister, I have lost myself in this snow globe of disappearance. I shake
the universe again and again and the stars just keep falling. They don’t
know any other way.
Love,
Frida
Lois P. Jones’s first poetry collection, Night Ladder (Glass Lyre), was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. A 2023 winner of the Alpine Fellowship, her work is published in Poetry Wales, Plume, Guernica Editions, by the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere.
Photo by Hamza Baig on Unsplash
