Homeland Insecurity

Nous sommes le
18 Ventôse, An 214

I nearly made a fool of myself that evening,
standing in the mansion’s entrance hall
with its chandeliers, Corinthian columns, vases
shimmering at the mention of vanished dynasties.
Since the professor seemed to be dropping names
I thought I’d sound a little hard of hearing:
Remarque? here on a lark a century ago?
Strange, I thought he was barely a baby or so...
But thanks to what must have been a long line
of visitors still sillier to the shrine
my host soon recovered his composure –
ah yes, you mean the middle name!
Maria’s been a source of some suspicion
even among us seasoned epicureans.
Certain critics claim that Rilke too
had bisexual leanings. One might doubt
this place, however, gave him cause to flout
more than a few new lines and feed his fame.
Thus reconciled, we joined the rest at dinner;
unlike the leukemic bard, I emerged no thinner.

Indisposed to let these beauties awe me,
though, and knowing well the works concerned,
questions in my mind began to gnaw me.
Why had such a literatus turned
to the frozen north for flickers of inspiration,
he who laid a continent at his feet
and changed his socks as readily as his nation,
itching to be the ultimate aesthete,
dreamed of warming the world to the invisible
shades of immortal Orpheus’ fabled plectrum?
Fact is, I find the notion rather risible
of hanging human hopes on a hole in the spectrum.
Maybe it was just the lack of light
in polar regions he aspired to test
before he got arrested in his flight
at the Universal Government’s behest
for using darkness unpatriotically.
Suddenly I felt sorry that old Rainer
hadn’t simply settled down erotically.
Fools rush out where angels wear eyeliner.

--Jon Cloud van Leuven

Note: The mansion in question is in a suburb of Gothenburg, Sweden. Rilke stayed there for a while around 1904 as the guest of a rich family.