Einfallen - Remaining Light In Duino Poem by Warren Falcon

NOTE: Einfallen - German - verb meaning to fall, invade, enter, collapse, come to mind, aha, flash of insight

[Beginning with two lines from Fifth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke which was inspired by Pablo Picasso's painting, Le Saltimbanques - The Acrobats, with which Rilke lived for awhile]

1

'You that fall with the
thud only fruits know, unripe, '

here wait to be shaken.

Here we carry, or ought to - driven so much past
bitter root - sugar, not for ourselves but for the gods
to sweeten their too objective palates

to open them into our subjectivity which, secret told, is
what they crave, our realist sufferings, such are sweet
to them, makes them, too, more solid -

what they seek - solidity beyond our capacities to reify
but for Imagination which conducts/births them into material
being.

Our extreme suffering compensates for, gravitates, their
too refined coldness toward heat.

They, like scattered flour, having no leaven,
dream/desire us-the-leaven; they seek/swell

into what we have, what we bring, we, the most baked,
to be torn into, eaten, too, for yearning gods' sake.

They come/fall compelled to colors, palettes, ours, upon
worn pallets, these acrobats, as-yet-enfleshed lovers in
not yet felt world and literal sense, they

do balance, risk, stumble, break, stutter/cry, utter such,
further dimension into

desire's bodies, breath, ashes,
importantly, always just arriving

forgetting the arguing seed's
previous vertical discontentment.


2


Such skies already known

limb by limb escape

slowly their shaping.

They suspend, extend then

into their felt fall,

hard land into waking.

What uses for tears there

are gathered there from

the eye, pour upon the

cheek from which miscreant

tongues may most drink.


3


Think again upon these things

which go about in darkness and

stumble against begging no pardon

intent still on passage confused

for words or Ibn Arabi's 'Black Light'

no light at all or thing but a gnossis

found, or given.


Gnossis, most striven for, in minutest motes, is.


All this to say, Ready.

Darkness. Expand/extend

further beyond (yet into)

unsaid street corner,

into inarticulate cathedral,

into unutterable mosque,

into wholly other loci

dependent upon uninhabited

blue field, crust, what

passes for, or has, Light,

just overtones 'beyond the fiddle.'


4


Now here must stop

in what is remaining light to cook


must bend to the purple cabbage at hand,

the courage of the knife

the helpful drive of hunger,


marvel yet again, it's faceted pattern when

halved, same as the onion, the leek


Such facets in me too reveal when

I dare to be loved in two



**The quote in the poem is from the Fifth Duino Elegy