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Proposition
That the smell of cows drifting through the open window is, indeed, that of a living beast.
That I too am a living beast.
That the body I possess is inhabited only by me.
That my body is neither at rest nor occupied by dramatic motion.
That I am, by my best account, fully alive.
That the room in which I am seated is in Germany, in a town called Worpswede.
That a poet I admire once lived here too, though he is long since dead.
Rilke wrote, “That I gently wipe away the look of suffered injustice sometimes hinders the pure motion of spirits a little.”
That there are such things as “spirits.”
That we were born suffering, but that we are not meant to suffer.
That the wind blows and the birches outside my window sing a little.
And that cooing and chucking of the dove I hear is also a kind of song.
That the difference between the living and the dead is mostly one of conjugation.
Er starb. Er istgestorben. Ein gestorbenes Mensch.
That what we make when we speak is a kind of music, but disjointed and that music seeks
a unity that our speech does not possess.
Once I felt as though I was dead, but now the reasons for that feeling baffle me.
I marvel at what it is to feel the sun on my skin.
“Burnish,” is the word that comes into my head.
“Burnished by the sun,” as if my torso was a copper shield.
That my torso is a kind of shield protecting the inside from the outside.
Though we all know we are penetrable in many ways.
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Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, published in 2021 by Graywolf Press. His other titles include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and elsewhere and has published individual poems in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine He serves as the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program, and lives near the village of Catskill in New York’s Hudson Valley.
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Jonathan Meese, DR. Z.U.K.U.N.F.T. FÜHRT, WIE SAU, COOL COOLISM… (ZEDADDY), 2017. Acrylic, Caparol-dispersion binder and mixed media on canvas; 2 panels.
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Author: Terence Winch
