the music of what happens: blackbirds and a mouse

these beings that are but fragments from absence

Rilke at Muzot, summer, 1926

My translation of three poems from Rilke's French are in the current issue of jmww

border marker (indiana, late october)

blackbirds

through the wall of this wound

photograph by erin

Red Photograph Inside a Gladiolus Blossom

The woman makes this image.
This is the garden inside the garden
and then again inside.

Erosblood glows
unfurling
through the wall of this wound
that opens the air like a sex.

Her looking strokes
breathe
the petals to further opening and opening
and un-
fold
membrane contour texture
different wet reds
shine.

All this from dirt and sun and water
dust the flower has healed
sepal
ovule
anthers laden dark
nudge of a cell upward
any touch would soft to bursting
and scatter sperm
inside the four chambers of the stone.

a shard from which I drank

[ always to be among words ]

Always to be among words, whether one wants to or not,
always to be alive, full of words about life,
as if words were alive, as if life were a-word.

But it's otherwise, believe me.
Between a word and a thing
you only encounter yourself,
lying by each as if next to someone ill,
never able to get to either,
tasting a sound and a body,
tasting out both.

It tastes of death.

Yet death and life, whether both exist,
who knows,
since so many of the dead are distant, though in me
there are so many dead,
the dead having also taken me
along with them.

a friend, a girl who once knew me,
a shard from which I drank to you....


--Ingeborg Bachmann
(my revision of Peter Filkins's translation)

a bit of slack

[ untitled ]

even if the branches wave
rustle
the evening light drowns
everything
bathes swathes soft
tranquil

we have
calm
lowered the gates of memory
shut the books

wind sweeps the rest

for a moment
we seem to belong
to the wind to the light
standing
unmoving
empty

as if here time left
a bit of slack in the rope

as if brusque there were
not a clean breakaway
but less wall


--Antoine Emaz
(my translation)