Let’s start the week with a poem, shall we? I’ve been asked to read at a friend’s wedding next month, and I’ve been trying to choose something. I’ve been digging through Rilke, one of my favourite poets, who writes wonderfully on love, but less well on marriage, and I haven’t found the right piece yet. If anyone has any suggestions, Rilke or otherwise, I’d love to har them.
One selection I certainly won’t be reading from, but I do want to reproduce here, are the seven phallic poems from 1915, one of the most perfect meldings of eroticism and art in all literature. Here’s the fourth, translated by John J. L. Mood:
You don’t know towers, with your diffidence
Yet now you’ll become aware
of a tower in that wonderful rare
space in you. Hide your countenance.
You’ve erected it unsuspectingly,
by turn and glance and indirection,
and I, blissful one, am allowed entry.
Ah, how in there I am so tight.
Coax me to the summit:
so as to fling into your soft night,
with the soaring of a womb-dazzling rocket,
more feeling that I am quite.
