Daymuses

Wouldn’t it be to be, just once, a tragic heroine, to have a falling feeling be so visible anyone with stories to see would want to rescue even if it couldn’t be? At last night’s party she was going down down down and the music was playing and it was like a depressive’s afternoon, just a bite of disappointment that had suggested there was something to consider, but the doors were all falling open in cascade. But myth is not allotted fair or in correspondence to talent. As usual she was the stork in a Russian fairy tale about death or, to speak for myself, I know it to be unlikely that either an amphibious beak-eyed turtle or GREAT SNARL BEAR in slim girl disguise would ever be actually seen—in mythic terms at least—as falling like Anna K. across the train-tracks. This is the difference between the sky that actually drowns us carries us, spider clinging to web trail, and the stories we insist on saying.

This silent commerce, when life is no longer willing
to endure one of our kind, when it seizes him in its grip.
avenges itself, kills. For the fact that its strength *can* kill
was palin to us all from its delicacy and restraint
and from the curious power that transforms us from living
beings
into survivors. Non being. Do you remember how often
a blind command would carry us through the icy
waiting room of new birth?... Us?--a body of eyes
under numberless lids, refusing? Carried the down-
thrown heart in our breast, the heart of a whole generation.

From "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efron by Rilke, Mitchell trans.