Poetry

Paula Modersohn-Becker to Rainer Maria Rilke 2 November 1908 Rainer, dear friend, you are mistaken. I am not a ghost. I am not a forlorn shade that follows you. It is your imagination, your guilt, your regret that conjures me. I have become the purest part of myself. Once, we spent so many nights together—…

The peacocks are dusty—           thirsty. They’ve come to the suburbs now looking for water. * Sisyphus walks in every town. Don’t tell me you thought there was only one—           stuck in a myth. Just look, he’s everywhere. * A doctor tells me he feels like…

I was home alone just hanging out on the sofa. It was in the position it used to be, against the side wall. Every now and then a phone seemed to ring, I couldn’t tell if it was his or mine. Two birds had got in. A big one and a small one. I had…

Arrives with his daughter, she’s all braced teeth and blunderbuss freckles, she bolts from the passenger seat of his Fiat Doblò and gallops with two dogs into the garden. It’s Sunday. Now suddenly here in his hand the awkward contraption: steel forks either end of a steel collar, galvanized spring and trigger, toothed prongs that…

Once a doctor inserted an instrument like a tube into my nose and throat. He said it wouldn’t hurt. He said it would drain the signs. He might have said sinuses. I was still young, young enough to play with paper dolls. I remember because I pulled a papergirl out of my pocket and introduced…

A large blousy bird in the nest—the vee       of her beak wide open to receive            all that I stop by to drop in.           Torn twigs are rough pricking      while the nest floor is mossy and tender. I let tasty bits fall into her mouth one after the other after the other—       she…

You could be rowing across a parking lot full of strangers who don’t see you, or drifting silently through the thick walls of an institution, when you reach that shore. And whatever you have on, even a plain hospital gown, that will be your robe for the ceremony that takes place in your last breath,…

Salisbury, solitary, sings as if Isaiah in her— All Along the Watchtower edge and ridge of plain they ride for Warminster. Anger, broken in her, iron age, stone age, bone and barrow, is as if her Father yet not father photographed before the war Unfathomed by her— Anger of another relatively new to her beside…

I want no more to do with what is understandable. There there. Only the lilliburlero of bird because it is songful. The lark ascending the air. Vaughan Williams’ Surrey local choir of ladies sorrowful between the wars. Only the dot and carry one of Clare who gave himself moon and stars to Northampton County Asylum…