Mountain Pools Like These

The week, another poem about love and difficulty therein.  In preparation for this, I pulled down my slim volume, Letters to a Yong Poet by Rainer Marie Rilke which was my watchword and guide to love and art in those days.  To my surprise, written in the back fly leaf were the words 'desultory fragmentation'!  So maybe this is also a reflection on last week as well?  For this poem, however, I was for looking what Rilke had to say about conventional behavior.  In the Seventh Letter are the key thoughts of Rilke on love and relationships of all the letters.  At one point he talks about how little some people understand love and the importance, literally for the universe of love and relationship. When the going gets tough, we react and every reaction is the same -
" . . . Convention; where people act out of a prematurely fused, turbid communion, every move is convention: every relation to which such entanglement leads has its convention, be it ever so unusual( that is, in the ordinary sense immoral); why, even separation would here be a conventional step, an impersonal chance decision without strength and without fruit."
That idea, and the idea that I could create a better and stronger relationship if I gave myself over to the task, would help determine the decisions that ultimately would change my life.  In the same letter, Rilke would conclude: "And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."


Mountain Pools Like These


It is in the nature of love, I think,
to flow like rivers - quiet and deep
as Venetian canals slip past baroque cathedrals-
or to crash over boulders like the Colorado,
down gullys and gorges carved of ledge.
(Mountain water takes the breath away.)


If, then, I don't write to you
it is because amid this, our tributary,
there are caresses like streams over stone
and silt, like gurgling brooks.
And there are passions' deep undertow
that lift and move like plates of glass
over your belly
                            and
                                       down your thighs.
And there are icy pools, such as this.

Where mountains in their splendor are moved
by your tear after tear.  I, too, am
shaken by your beauty; these
mountain pools take my breath away.


Day to day - 
                    this day -
metaphor will not contain the poetry
of your kiss and the line of your body
spooned next to mine in bed at night.
There is poetry I cannot write-
joy I feel and take like air and food.
But in these mountain pools,
                                                     my lover,
this heart aches with the cold.
  


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