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"Very Rilke"
By Lynn Emanuel
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005, at 3:39 AM PT
Click here to listen to Lynn Emanuel read this poem.
Like that time in Paris
in the 15th & here
& naked on mon balcon
in full view of my landlady on her fleurs blooming in a jardiniere
I'm answering nature's call
& can't remember why
when just below me is the WC I'm not going down there
even though the greves &
half of Paris are looking—
I mean I was guilty of everything already
but every time I remember
trying to remember
Why or Why not was or was not the WC
out of bounds, I feel
my mind refuse me
& I have come to think of this refusal as poetic.
I am oggled
but uncaptioned
violated but unexplained
despite the fact that I long to be
explained, to be clear, to be
transparent, really— my poems lacquered with a gloss of adjectives
until they beam like meringues.
In the boxes of these quatrains
like a prehistoric bee an Ur-bee in a block of amber
sealed in this scene of my degradation
I can't recall what made me do it
though I return & return to the hive of it this image, with me on its eternal,
absent-minded agenda. Very Rilke.
Bee of the invisible world,
gathering the honey of the visible. A professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, Lynn Emanuel is working on her fourth book of poems. She served as a judge for the 2004-2005 National Book Awards.
Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.
Please note: Because Slate's backlog of accepted poems is substantial, poetry editor Robert Pinsky will not be reading new submissions until December 2005.
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