TRANSLATION - Rainer Maria Rilke - page a month

The company is situation across from Raab, the greatest city in the northwest of Hungary. The man from Langenau rides out alone. Lowlands. Evening. The mist upon the saddle glistens through the dust. And then the moon comes up.
He sees it on his hands.
He dreams.
But out there, something screams to him.
Screams, screams,
tears him from the dream.
That is no owl. Mercy:
the only tree on the horizon
screams out to him:
You!
And he looks harder: it raises itself onto two legs. It raises a body alongside the tree, and a young woman,
bloody and naked,
lunges at him: Release me!

And he jumps off onto in the shadowy grass
and hacks through the thick knit
and he sees her image glow
and her teeth clench.

Is she laughing?

The horror.
And he sits back onto his horse
and races into the night. Bloody
laces tight in his fist.

* The second half of the first sentence I added for context. The military commander of Raab, Kristóf Lambert, thought the city indefensible against the advancing Turks, and chose to burn it down to nothing. To this day, the Turkish call it Gyor, Yanik kale ("burnt city"). Cornets Christoph Rilke must have seen it just before its demise.

Meningitis Stranglehold

no, its tooo cooldl jshe wasys
just seconds after suggesting
I remove all her clothing because
its too uncomfortable
to be worn.
spiked military mustaches have
waded through blood with less
of a shiver.
but I know nothing
and ask again
noooo, the beauty is
that you woon’t
get to look --
my god, if there’s any beauty then
I’ll have to be out of the loop
I think.
the hard crome machine stares
from the kitchen counter looking like
some medevil snow removal device.
her hands do in fact
look
cold, blue,
almost frost-bitten because
the sun’s behind her like a moon
doused in kerosene, then lit.
but my machine can’t quite lift
the newly fallen silence from her
barren parking lot eyes.
so we sip luke warm coffee,
a dove or something flies by
and I cut into the spine of a Tolstoy
almost forcing poor Ms. Karenina
into a meningitis stranglehold
so that she lets out a coo- coo
then I drop the whole thing
do you
really believe
we’re descended from apes?

4/12/07