The North Shore Poets’ Forum meets tomorrow at the Beverly Public Library, 11 a.m. to 1 ish. Melissa Varnavas is presenting a program on imagery, which she will illustrate with Rilke’s poem “Bowl of Roses.” Come!
BOWL OF ROSES
clump themselves together into a something
that was pure hate, t in the dirt
actors, piled-up exaggerators
careening horses crashed to the ground
their gazes discarded, baring their teeth
as if the skull peeled itself out through the mouth.
And now you know how these things are discarded
for here before you stands a full bowl of rose
which is unforgettable and brimming
with ultimate instances of being, of bowing down,
of offering, of being unable to give, of standing there,
almost as a part of us: ultimate for us too.
Noiseless living, opening without end
filling space without taking space from the space
that all the other things in it diminish
almost as if an outline, like something omitted
and pure inwardness with much curious softness
shining into itself right up to the brim
is anything as know to us as this?
And this: that a feeling arises
because petals are being touched by petals?
And this: that one opens itself like a lid,
and beneath lie many more eyelids,
all closed, as if, tenfold asleep, they
must damp down an inner power to see.
And above all this: that through these petals
light has to pass. Slowly they filter out
from a thousand skies the drop of darkness
in whose fiery glow the jumbled bundle
of stamens becomes aroused and rears up.
And look, what activity in the roses:
gestures with angles of deflection so small
no one would notice them, were it not for
infinite space where their rays diverge.
See this white one, so blissfully opened,
standing among its huge spreading petals
Like a Venus upright in her shell,
And look how that blushing one turns,
as if confused, toward the cooler one,
and how the cooler one, impassive, draws back,
and the cold one stands tightly wrapped in itself
among these opened ones, that shed everything.
And what they shed, how it can be
at once light and heavy, a cloak, a burden,
A wing, and a mask, it all depends,
and how they shed it: as before a lover.
Is there anything they can’t be: wasn’t this yellow one
that lies here hollow and open, the rind
of a fruit of which the same yellow,
more intense, more orange-red, was the juice?
And this one, could opening have been too much for it,
since, touched by air, its indescribable pink
has picked up the bitter aftertaste of lilac?
And isn’t this batiste one a dress, with
the chemise still inside it, soft and breath-warm,
both garments flung off together
in morning shade at the bathing pool in the woods?
And this opalescent porcelain,
fragile, a shallow china cup
filled with little lighted butterflies,—
and this, containing nothing but itself.
And aren’t’ they all doing the same: simply containing themselves,
if to contain oneself means: to transform the world outside
and wind and rain and patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and disguised fat
and darkness of earth at evening
all the way to the errancy, flight, and coming on of clouds,
all the way to the vague influence of the distant stars
into a hand full of inwardness.
Now it lies free of cares in the open roses.
North Shore Poets' Forum 