Chris Edwards
Rilke Renditions I
Rilke Renditions I
A stink arose — Boom! — or maybe an O, sang Orpheus, as he
yearned toward his Big Mistake. What horror! What a Blockage of the
earways! Oh, and as the verse-writing gang got steadily closer —
fanged, winking, full of wanderlust, a vortex
turning on the same old Still Point — we really tore up
that dungeon, he continued, like a clarion call from the lost world
of Lager and Goodnight. I mean they’d studied Aust Lit and might
still be trying its Ne’ers and Nots in an Angst of leased warrens
surrounded by Holdens, Borrowed Schlock, Garrotting —
you can see it in their kindly arts prizes. But what an About Turn
they faced — the long climb from Hades, and all those wars
against the Emphatic Ones, the Underschleppers, the drunken
Verlaine gang, the intermittent Kazoo gang — foppish imposters
the lot, dross, old shoes fit for anyone who hoards them!
