The Visitation, Monotype of the Day #200

Feels good to break into the 200s 😊
Sometimes it takes sheer force of will. Spent the day on forced bed rest ruminating on more Rilke. "You must change your life" has always been an animating principle for me. My father always modeled this concept when I was growing up. When I first discovered this poem as a teen I took its call to change to heart.

Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 - 1926

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.