Rainier Maria Rilke Speaks to the Purported End

Wrap yourself in solar winds if this terrible end
of plasma spewed trajectored out past and into,
magnetics dancing like lovers
coronal expulsion refracted back, comes.

Is the borealis lake in the sky, a place we knew once,
coming back to hold us in cupped hands like hairless,
trembling mice?

Let it be an end of light, of color, of beauty terrible
and near like a breath suspended over your ear,
a feeling of heat but not close enough to hear the words.

Don’t be scared of the crackings
and rumors of earthquakes,
it’s only her loud whispering,
a dirt and clay lullaby.
It’s only the creaking
of all the floorboards everywhere
settling in for the night.

When you,

if you,

lose me,

Bury yourself in the blankets
we moved beneath.
follow the scent
look for me past the constellations
as they rearrange and begin
an ancient circling of joy
(no amount of slicing polarities
can silence the song that brings
all to movement, to stillness of water
to field of lilies, to sky of sparrow)
and I’ll find you in sleep.

And if you feel scared,
if shadows take shapes
you recognize too easily
remember the voice
of that song.

Enter it.
Be


Four Minute Warning

We discussed the falseness of desire
the sluggish receding of the moon,
and which lasts longer in memory:
the metallic taste of blood
or the blow,
which is a better answer:
the silence after a blizzard,
or the arcing curve of the chicken
and the wind ripple that fills the crescent.

In the deep of my belly there is a world
I will never know. I swallow,
as you lean back and close your eyes
a sigh escaping as supplication, it
rises on wings to a spackled ceiling
with sparkles blown in.

These stars will never fall,
these children
will never
break our hearts.

What comes this way
is the feeling
of seed pushing
through ash.