Only in the night sometimes one seems to know the road (guest post by Rainer Marie Rilke)

Perhaps we always retrace by night the stretch we have won laboriously in the foreign sun?

Maybe. The sun is heavy, as with us deep in summer at home. But we took our leave in summer. The women’s dresses shone long out of the green. And we have been riding long. So it must be autumn. At least there, where sorrowful women know of us.

 from The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke translated by M.D. Herter Norton

Atlas of Goodbyes #2 (guest post by Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps I feel your absence more keenly beside you four months before we marry in February chill of river house, startled awake on a fold-out couch under shelves of Greek amphoras and Turkish grave rubbings chalked by your grandmother’s hands.

Or maybe it was just a dream, not sighting with weight of prophecy, those silhouettes of snakes tipping Trident inches above us, red brine frothing like scorched cider, Neptune’s conditional permission to love you. Don’t forget, he added, your lover is of the sea. One day I will bring him home to me. His words fell contextless in the days before black seams of episiotomies, sting of newborn gum-bones on breast. How dare you take him before we begin.

Atlas of Goodbyes #1

Perhaps I feel your absence today in a loosening lull in the rain after a clap of thunder shakes the upper windows of the house that once spoke to me alone when I leaned my elbows along the delicate edge of her windowsills.

Maybe as I recall the pivotal scene of our parting, a performance of memory I’ve become expert on, the permanent sting feels unnatural like a cat that can’t relax or a persistent tingle traveling across my scalp held in momentarily by the music’s easy beat, cold drink in hand, the comfort of small talk.

Waiting

Perhaps like a jewel in the hollow of my hand time’s silence shines in the moonlight of my dreams, well outside the daily hustle and thrum that cloaks the world’s divinity.

Maybe as we run on like hungry goats trampling and trespassing on land that is preserved, waiting is the calm within our agitation and patience the art that allows us to access a new point of tangency where each creative act is a muddled attempt to enter the stream.