Letter to the Animal I Was
after Rainer Maria Rilke
You are still standing at the edge of the field where I left you, unwilling to be named.
I want to tell you that the naming was not the injury. The injury was how quickly I agreed to it, how I put down the four legs of my attention and learned to balance on the two that answer questions.
You would not recognise my hands now. They have become good at holding what is handed to them.
If I came back — and I will not come back — I would not ask you to forgive the leaving. I would ask you to keep doing what you are doing: standing very still at the tree line, refusing, with your whole body, to be a thing that has been explained.
Rilke's letters and elegies keep addressing something just out of reach — an angel, a young poet, a self not yet arrived. This poem turns that address backwards, toward a self already left behind.