——After Rilke
Come, you whom I must now accept.
Just as my spirit burned, behold, I burn
in you: hopeless torment in the flesh’s net.
Lifelong, the wood that refused its turn
now acquiesces to your blazing flame
that, nourishing you, consumes me.
My native leniency inside your rage
becomes itself a hellish surge, otherworldly.
Utterly pure, egoless, free of any future, I
climbed the dread jigsaw of suffering’s pyre,
certain surely of this heart’s silent store
in the lost time purchased for it by Nowhere.
Is it still me burning beyond recognition?
I will not immolate my memories inside.
O life, life, you are everything outside.
And I ablaze in flame. Unknown—No one.
(So, renounce: that’s not how affliction was
once upon in childhood. Holding off. Excuse
for becoming bigger, more. All calls and whispers.
Don’t adulterate this with what once astonished.)
Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His latest book, The Mansions (Four Way), is a trilogy of long poems that form a single design.
Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash
