NEEDLING

Perfect weather. 69 degrees, no humidity to speak of, slight breeze, partly cloudy. This morning I wake up without a hangover, feeling good about life, and I don’t even have to go to work. Yesterday I finally won against the bugs in my computer without having to reformat my hard-drive – knock on wood – and I can sit here at my desk staring at my backyard, the dirt back-alley which divides the blocks of houses and yards, the large yellow butterflies skipping around letting the air carry their featherweights around...

I was sitting on the shitter, and at random I opened my little tiny pocket book of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell, the very same little tiny book which saved me from myself during the 95 to 97 depression (personal depression), the same depression which took me from Maine to Texas via California several times... and I’ve rarely picked that book up since... at random I read a passage (Shambhala Pocket Classics... the size of the book and the way it is printed makes it hard to know the correct line breaks... sorry about that) :

Oh and springtime would hold it --, everywhere it would echo
the song of annunciation. First the small
questioning notes intensified all around
by the sheltering silence of a pure, affirmative day.
Then up the stairs, up the stairway of calls, to the dreamed-of
temple of the future --; and then the trill, like a fountain
which, in its rising jet, already anticipates its fall
in a game of promises .... And still ahead: summer.
Not only all the dawns of summer --, not only
how they change themselves into day

Look, I was calling for my lover. But not just she
would come... Out of their fragile graves
girls would arise and gather... For how could I limit
the call, once I called it? These unripe spirits keep seeking
the earth. – Children, one earthly Thing
truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.
Don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood;
how often you outdistanced the man you loved, breathing, breathing
after the blissful chase, and passed on into freedom.