swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

 bowl of night with symphonies
Elly Katz

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Rilke Refrains

Rilke floods my bloodstream,
his timeless inculcation to live my questions,
to shelter myself in their shelter.

But I no longer know how, and for what, to inquire—
how to lilt my cadence just so at their pronouncement,
how to crease my forehead in that fine-tuned reflexive duet
of bafflement and incredulity,
how to sum suffering into speech,
how to practice being alive, here,
an organism oriented.

Rilke does not leave me in the lurch
but presides in some inner corridor,
refraining, refraining,
tuneless lyrics limping on a limb into my frontal cortex,
shimmering bright as Andromeda
stamping the bowl of night with symphonies

His Book of Hours fuels my hours,
reflected moonlight I feel but cannot see,
an almost divine tenderness, gentle crackling
of firewood thawing limitless winter.

His voyaging verses potently radiate warmth,
a faint trickle of saintly succor.
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Tears accelerate down my drawn cheeks—
a face I am unready to face,
feeling I am unready to feel—
his unspoken impression eliciting something ineffable
that induces me to aspire to live in the question marks,
even if the questions have yet to reveal themselves.

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At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went to a doctor for mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Upon waking from anesthesia, she searched in vain for the right half of her body. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. Her path towards science, amongst other ambitions, came to a halt.  As a devout writer, she feared that poetry, too, fell outside what was possible given her inert right fingers. However, in the wake of tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor.