Let Everything Happen to You by Natalie Eilbert

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 30, 2015   Let Everything Happen to You   Natalie Eilbert

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.            Copyright © 2015 by Natalie Eilbert. Used with permission of the author. 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   Natalie Eilbert is the author of Swan Feast (Coconut Books, 2015). She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review and lives in Brooklyn, New York.   Photo Credit: Emily Raw Poetry by Eilbert   Swan Feast (Coconut Books, 2015) "please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop]" by Rusty Morrison "Blue Palestine" by Ariana Reines "Parkeresque" by Rebecca Wolff Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038