(Week Eleven) Improvisation #4 The Sonnet

of Rainer Maria Rilke's "I, 2"
--from The Sonnets To Orpheus

And it was almost a girl who, stepping from
this single harmony of song and lyre,
appeared to me through her diaphanous form
and made herself a bed inside my ear.

And slept in me. Her sleep was everything:
the awesome trees, the distances I had felt
so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:
all wonders that had ever seized my heart.

She slept the world. Singing god, how was that first
sleep so perfect that she had no desire
ever to wake? She: she arose and slept.

Where is her death now? Ah, will you discover
this theme before your song consumes itself?---
Where is she vanishing? . . . A girl, almost . . . .


My Improv':

And it was almost a perfect outline of a boy, who, laying down
his guitar kept singing with both hands, a three quarters harmony
in love with the world, and made his tongue an isthmus
between our lips. And together we knelt at the altar to pray
for transparency, for necessary sins that test man and woman
on their strengths against one another and the other is always
a curved body with lithe coils of hair, her eyes are sintuous.
She is serpentine, both man and woman cannot reject her song.