Set

[rejectomorph]

Late sun found a path to my window and revealed the dust that danced to my exhalations. Outside, a chimney releases smoke the shade of an old mirror, and a restless blue jay flits among the mulberry tree's bare branches. The street has dried to a pale gray, and the treetrunk moss no longer wears its jewels. Breaking clouds drift and shrink, preparing a space for the stars that night will soon expose.

For now, the cleared patches of sky remain pale blue, and the clouds brighten as they withdraw, except over the mountains where they mass and the stormdark lingers. Days seems attenuated, like the aspiring pines. Time has slowed, paused, as though to gaze into my window as I look out. Does it watch me? I exhale, and the sun-flecked dust scatters.




Sunday Verse

Archaic Torso of Apollo

by Rainer Maria Rilke


We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

—translated by Stephen Mitchell