In the biographies of Rilke, you get the feeling
you also get now and then in the poems
that here, surely, is a man among the archetypes of all men
you’d rather hang than have notice your daughter.
And yet, how not to admire the pure oceanic illogic
of his arguments, those preposterous
if irremediable verities. It can’t be helped. They’re true.
And there’s no other word for him, for whom sadness is
a kind of foreplay, for whom seduction
is the by-product of the least practical art there is.
Those titanic skills in language, the knack lacked by
every other lung-driven swimmer through the waters
of lexicon, in spite of the fierce gravities of all grammar
and the sad, utilitarian wallflowers of usage:
well, there you go, my half-assed angel, that’s your challenge.
Beethoven believed he was homely too, but you
must understand: Rilke’s tools you can pick up, every one
but the one they all share. Even Stevens,
who must have known an actuary or two and still for whom
the brown salt skin of order sang beyond and in the ache
of longing. And Celan, whose most terrible angels
rang him like a bell of rings. And Whitman,
dandy of the cocked hat and tilted head himself,
the gentlest, the gentile Jew, the jubilant lonely grubber
eyeing the grocery boy. Inside
them all, a man, if you could help it,
you would never consent to become,
except if only, just for once, you could be him.