As a girl I made my calves into little drinking elephants,
I would stare at the wonder of their pumping muscles,
the sup of their leg-trunks. I resuscitated a bunny once
from my cat's electric teeth. I was on neighborhood watch
to save animals, as many as I could. My damage was easy.
My plainspoken voice is a watercolor. I'm afraid of it
as I'm afraid of what the world will do to color. I don't
think I've done much. A table leans against itself
to be a table. I hold nothing but this air. I give it off.
I want a literature that is not made from literature, says Bhanu.
Last night my legs ached a low-tone. I imagined the body
giving itself up for another system. Dandelions tickling
out of my knee. The meniscus a household of worms.
It is okay to bear. My apartment hums in a Rilke sense.
A pain blooms. I am told that it's okay to forego details
of what happened. I am told it doesn't matter now.
I want to write sentences for days. I want days to not
be a sentence. We put men in boxes and sail them away.
Justice gave me an amber necklace. I tried to swallow
as many as I could.

About This Poem
"A friend recently reminded me of this Rilke poem from 'The Book of Hours,' which begins, 'God speaks to each of us as he makes us, / then walks with us silently out of the night.' As a girl, I experienced traumas enough to make me feel I didn't even exist, that I was some manifold spirit of many subjects and objects. There's a line in the Rilke poem, 'Let everything happen to you,' which is both an admission and an ecstatic gesture, and I wanted this poem to capture those existential, sublime feelings alongside terror, revenge, etc. The quiet of Rilke's poem allowed in all these things."
-Natalie Eilbert

About Natalie Eilbert
Natalie Eilbert is the author of "Swan Feast" (Coconut Books, 2015). She is the founding editor of "The Atlas Review" and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Natalie Eilbert. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate