From “A Year With Rilke”
In My Glad Hours
“In my glad hours, I will make a city of your smile, a distant city that shines and lives. I will take one word of yours to be an island on which birches stand, or fir trees, quite still and ceremonial. I will receive your glance as a fountain in which things can disappear and above which the sky trembles, both eager and afraid to fall in.
I will know that all of this exists, that one can enter this city, that I have glimpsed this island and know exactly when there is no one else beside that fountain. But if I appear to hesitate, it is because I am not sure whether it is forest through which we are walking or my own mood that is shaded and dark.
Who knows: maybe Venice, too, is just a feeling.” -Rilke
Elizabeth Weber 
Simply perfect Elizabeth
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http://thesonneteer.blogspot.com/2015/10/i-will-make-city-of-your-smile.html
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2015
“I WILL MAKE A CITY OF YOUR SMILE”
for Elizabeth Weber
Rilke guiding her to canvas, she paints
a surreal monument: glowing-embered
masked witch doctor or profiled Asian saint
flourishing high marred crucifix (severed
of right arm), embroidered robe of passioned
colors to humble Joseph’s sacred coat.
What is this bright light rising (like Hung Shing’s
blazing torch) from behind our saint? Devote
our faith to its hope. Give us reason to
believe it will save our seething structure
from those rustling emerald vines set to
entangle and suffocate all, rupture
our pillar’s memory of images blessed
on this torn canvas our artist has caressed.
Roger Armbrust
October 7, 2015
PECULIAR PROGRESSIVE on Blogspot
Roger Armbrust formerly served as national news editor of Back Stage in New York City, where he also taught a professional writing course at New York University. His poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, Chelsea, Icarus, and Delaware Poetry Review. He has a book of poetry, How to Survive, from August House, and a chapbook, Final Grace, published by Birch Brook Press. Two recent books of sonnets–“oh touch me there: Love Sonnets” and “The Aesthetic Astronaut”–both from Parkhurst Brothers, Publishers, are available online from Amazon and other book sites. He also served as editor-in-chief of Parkhurst Brothers, where editing duties included books in the Our National Conversation Series. He now lives in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, where he continues to write and edit. He is associate curator of New York City-based “The Clyde Fitch Report.” He also co-founded and co-curates “reality: a world of views”.
View my complete profile
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