Trans Rilke by Sal Randolph

I let that hysterical overabundance of longing, no, of beauty, make me sick with itself

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Trans Rilke

by Sal Randolph

Who if I cried, if I cried cried out the door out onto the street out of the confines of this skin who if I wept would hear, what beauty would hear me, what beauty I have known would know me, what beauty would press me suddenly against their chest and would it be breasty, would I feel nipples, would I feel pecs, would I feel scars, would those scars consume me, would the scars of the transforming beauty know me or destroy, would the scars be crying out like mouths, would the scars remember their own beauty, would the beauty scream me back into life, would I endure the scream and would the scream endure itself or would we explode outward into, into, into, I am stuttering here, standing in the street, I want to say naked but standing barefoot, standing with my head thrown back to the always-sky, and in dreaming it is night but only one or two stars make it through of that annihilating excess of stars, everything unseeable irradiating the ordinary city street, the dog-strewn sidewalk, and in dreaming I lie down there and remember some hillside, or more likely some stretch of water, while my ears fill with car-sound and water-sound, and I let that hysterical overabundance of longing, no, of beauty, make me sick with itself, but I’ve asked for this, make me sick, make me sick with you, make me sick of you, otherwise I am just one of the dead, and it has been like this for some time, and I made it like this, I made it barren, I made it numb, I made it known, I made it well, well-made, well-made-wellness without the well, walking the streets looking for the river, I know it’s here somewhere, muttering out loud, singing out loud on the streets, looking and finding just that sliver of edited water between pilings and parks, that slice of sky between buildings, all of this is known to you, but I refuse to turn my head at the sound of a name rhyming with mine, I refuse, yes, among the refuse, the disgust and discard, the infinite pollutants, the plastic, the garbage bags broken open again, the lovely and abundant garbage from whom I could live if I didn’t always turn away, it’s the garbage and dirt and dried urine that could help and comfort, that could ease, that is you, is you, and you tell me now not to cry.

Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Sal Randolph, wherein she discusses language, action, and connection. About the featured poem above, she says:

At the time I wrote “Trans Rilke,” I was working on a book about beauty. I could never find the language I wanted for that project, so it didn’t get written, but during that time I was trying to understand what beauty was (impossible)…. I didn’t set out to queer or trans Rilke, it’s more like his poems became part of a storm of language and ideas that queered or transed me as I wrote them down.