Rainer Maria Rilke (left) and the author

I was a runaway when I was 15. Ran from Chicago to New York. Got off the Greyhound bus at four in the morning, armed with a guitar named Beulah, a canvas knapsack heavy with books and paper, and $11.39 in the pocket of my jeans.

• I walked in the street and suddenly
• it was stretched with trembling strings.
• ...It’s only a queen who dares to dance,
• yes, dance in a city street!

My New York uncle gave me the name Rilke after he, my aunt, and I had finished a heavy meal and were lounging around the living room of their West Side flat. “Rilke,” he said. “You ought to read Rilke.”

I had been staying with them for a few days. The multitude of streets, the beds of strangers in which I slept, all receptive to my manic joy, were also wearying and wearing, with a pace difficult to maintain. I fled to the home of this aunt and uncle but discovered this was no place to be either, since they demanded I follow certain rules that my orneriness just would not allow.

I was soon back on the bus to Chicago, to the familiar pat tern of my mother’s nagging about my bad behavior and my escaping to the streets for two or three days and nights in between.

• Whoever you are, go out into
• the evening,
• leaving your room, of which
• you know each bit;
• your house is the last before
• the infinite,
• whoever you are.
• Then with your eyes that
• wearily
• scarce lift themselves from
• the wornout doorstone
• slowly you raise a shadowy
• black tree
• and fix it on the sky: slender,
• alone.
• And you have made the
• world (and it shall grow
• and ripen as a word, unspo
• ken still).
• When you have grasped its
• meaning with your will,
• then tenderly your eyes will
• let it go....

Not long after I had returned, I was wandering the streets and happened to stop in this bookstore, where I saw a used copy of selected poems by that name Rilke. I took the book to a nearby park and set tled down on the grass to read. It was a curious experience. I could not possibly have had much in common with Rilke. I was a young, black female child of the ghetto; he was a white male born in Prague in 1875, dead years before I was even born. Yet there was some thing that drew me to his poems, and as I read them, this tiny “ah” kept rising from my throat.

If it had been madness of a sort that had sent me fleeing to New York City, it was the mad ness born from the desire to be free. I saw the freedom inher ent in the queen who would dare dance in the streets and, in setting forth and setting out all that my self desired, I saw the beauty of selfcreation and world creation. Poetry had always seemed entrapment to me, a falling into the words of another and into a world con trolled entirely by the poet. Rilke had no desire to control me. I was not trapped. I was set free. Yet one learns that free dom is not simply the absence of chains nor the wan dering in the streets with no visible restrictions. The freedom inherent in Rilke’s poetry was the more dangerous sort. The one that leaves you standing alone on the edge of the precipice, asking whether you dare take the plunge or not. It is a freedom that carries you to the point of nothingness, asking what you will make of this, what you will do there.

What is this story all about? Not about my relationship with Rilke now — we having grown older and having stomped around the escarpment — but about how I first came to know him. It is about my grandmother and my greatgrandmother and all my ancestors, enslaved and free, though none are mentioned by name. It is about leaping over mountains and taking flight from the tops of clouds, though none of this is here described. It is about Rilke and me in the simplest way in which we existed: him writing his words, me living my life.

So. In the living room of my family’s apartment, where I slept on a couch/bed, I would pick up Rilke and, amidst the sounds of the neigh borhood, of curses and laughter and children screaming, the L train screeching around the corner, car horns blow ing, and from some where a recording of Percy Sledge singing “When a Man Loves a Woman,” I would read about memories lost and enchanted gazelles. I would read about blue hydrangeas, delicate flamingos, and anguished solitude, while the smells of cabbage and greens drifted out from the kitchen, and I could hear my mother hum softly an old church spiritual. I read,

• I have seen for some
• time now
• the change in every
• thing
• Something arises and
• acts
• and kills and brings
• suffering

• In the gardens now
• from day to day
• is a change from green
• to yellow and gray
• a slow dyingaway:
• how long my road has
• been.

• Now I stand in this
• emptiness
• and look down the
• rows of trees.
• Almost to the distant
• sea
• the foreboding
• earnestness
• of the sky lies heavily.

being asked of me. In the emptiness stood I, and the foreboding heaviness was of the world within that I. It was up to me to chal lenge this weight and, teetering on the edge of freedom, lift myself off to the heights. The road that lay behind me, where all had been given to me, was long — yes — and long overdue to be over. Grow up. It is time to put away those children things and take the plunge.

I Would Like To Pray

Later, my partners and I would walk the streets, up and down, aimlessly, sharing a couple of bot tles of white port wine. We’d go to the restaurant on the corner, order a ham sandwich on white bread with double extra mayonnaise and extra double mustard, and get a bag of weed between two slices of bread. We’d take our fivedollar sandwich to Lincoln Park, sit on the benches in front of the monkey cage, taking tokes and sips and some times think something about our lives. About what choices we could make. About what our chances for survival might be. We thought we were tough and could not be hurt by anything or anyone, and yet we knew how limited were choices for kids like us and how difficult and unpre dictable was survival. Our lives had been decided for us a long time before our birth, and now, now it would be very much a matter of luck if any dream we chose to pursue became reality.

One of my friends said he would not join the Army and fight for no white man. He did not say what he would do or could do instead. Dreams were kept unspoken. We lived by certain assumptions. Most of the girls assumed that they might marry, have children, and, if lucky, be loved and cherished. A few, me among them, assumed the opposite. We would never marry, never have children, never be loved or cherished. We would make this journey alone. Why we assumed that rather dismal scenario came from our scorn of the other girls’ assump tions that we, looking at the lives of those we knew, considered fantasy. We would grow up in this world but never be disappointed by what ever misery occurred. We were high. Off the weed and the white port. We would head south back to our neigh borhood, walking through the Gold Coast area, ritzy, rich, white, and so despised by us. We always walked look ing up at their windows, sometimes seeing them inside, seemingly so smug, smart, secure, while we felt the stench of our fear, our loneli ness, our ignorance, our black selves for whom no one wished us well. We would see one of them walking down the street, looking easy, walking soft, a god of the world,

Quite often I became afraid. I knew what was and we’d do him or her, do ’em and grab what we could from pockets and purses. We’d get enough for more ham sand wiches, more white port, and maybe have some thing left over for some thing else. We’d laugh at the look they had in their eyes as we grabbed at them and ran. “Niggers.” They would never forgive the rest of our race. But we never felt sorry, we never felt guilty, and the beatings and poundings we delivered onto their bodies we felt were justi fied. It was the violence of our lives, done to us, and the violence returned one by one by one. It was easy to do them harm. What was difficult was to stop the beatings before they got out of hand.

• Far from the onlooker
• be every breath of pity,
• not from the hunter
• merely,who,pro ceeding, alert,
• ceeding, alert,
• fulfills that which is
• timely.
• Killing is a form of our
• wandering
• sorrow
• ...
• Pure in the spirit
• serene
• is what happens to
• ourselves.

In Rilke’s poetry: sorrow and the burning pain of solitude. I lay on my couch/bed and found death too. I studied the lines and stanzas of end ings, of dying, of life unfulfilled and felt close to tears. For I could toler ate those feelings and thoughts inside me — I thought myself so strange at that time that death and death thoughts seemed entirely appropriate for me. But I could not bear that oth ers could feel that way too. It seemed to me then that it could not be me, or anyone, who was the strange one, but that it was the world itself that caused these feelings to surface again and again in the hearts of all kinds of people. And if that was so — that it was the world and not the people in the world — then what could possibly be done? We could cure our own ills, perhaps. But how to cure the sickness of the world, a glance at which caused such terri ble feelings of sorrow? I was so disturbed by what I read that I thought I would explode in agony.

• ...I would like to walk
• out of my heart
• under the wide sky.
• I would like to pray.

Still, I read on. And the more I read, the more I began to see that, though death was very much a part of Rilke, life was there just as strong. I saw Rilke and there was death on one side of him and life on the other, and he walked down the middle as the two converged before and behind. He stood in the small center between the two, and the whole was life and death. Life and death meeting before and behind swirled through his poetry and converged in the art and act of cre ation, rather like an explosion that was nei ther all joy nor all sorrow but a center of pure being.

Within these thoughts and these words I sensed salvation. Rilke became as much a part of my salvation as had Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam” or “Four Women.” Along the lines of life we all so shakily walked lay answers and meaning. The suggestion that we stoop to pick up some of those answers and mean ings was frightening, and yet it was that or nothing.

Don’t be afraid to stoop down and get there.

All that I felt and all that I was combined to create, the mystery and the mysteries that some how needed to be con fronted. Bewildered? Dis turbed? I often had a vision of myself standing alone, apart, from a for est of humanlike figures. This, and the forest too, needed both to be accepted.

Rilke’s poetry sug gests that nothing — no truth, no beauty, no any thing — can come unless one is prepared to take the risk of pursuing that truth, pursuing the god that will bring forth the prayer and allowing the self to be let go...out of the heart...that the prayer might come.

Reading him I thought, I would like to pray. I would like to believe there is some thing worth praying for and someone to whom I could pray. I would like to leave all that I have been taught and leap into that abyss where nothing is certain, nothing sure, except that then prayer is genuinely possible.

Go then. Go to it.

Freddy and me ate bags of bananas and car rots as we went around talking revolution to the dudes and dudesses in the streets — “organiz ing.” We held meetings that few bothered to attend, printed mimeo graphed sheets of paper upon which we had scribbled our ideas, and called for strikes, boy cotts, demonstrations, armed battle. We saw our neighborhood and our people on the verge of collapse.

Most were apathetic towards our concerns and didn’t want to get involved. Few listened. Once, we went beneath the Ltrain traces and sat with winos drinking cheap wine out of paper bags and suggested that there just might be a bet ter way to live. They looked at us, wildeyed 17 and 18yearolds, and laughed. We saw junkies weaving down the streets and taunted them for their weakness.

“All we want to do is save ourselves, save our souls,” Freddy would say. “Find something to believe in that will believe in us in return.”

He scorned my feel ings for Rilke. “If that man was here right now, right here, he’d spit on you just like all these other ofays and hunkies. He’d be just as racist and as much of a pig as they are. He’d fit right in. And...he’d call you nig ger.” I did not doubt that Freddy was right. If Rilke was here, wouldn’t he have to choose a side like all the rest of us? Wouldn’t he, because of his color, choose the side aligned with most of the rest of his color? But he wasn’t here. He didn’t have to choose. And I didn’t have to choose for him.

Freddy said, “Forget about him. Read your own people, learn your own history.”

I had never looked at Rilke as being

in history, for it seemed as if the biographical details of Rilke’s life were periph eral to his life. He lived not in the details of dates, time, and events but in the interior with out time. Yet the dates during which he lived were dates in the history of my people. I knew how much in history I was and was forced to be. Did I have to “forget about him” because of our differences? Was knowing and liking him a betrayal of my people and my history? Was the need to remember my history such that I could not also include Rilke in my life?

Letters To A Young Poet

I stood beneath the street signs, looking up at the names: Goethe, Schiller, Sedgwick. I savored the sound of them and the images they brought forth. But I thought it odd that on Goethe Street would be where the dope dealers congregated, on Schiller where the junkies died, and on Sedgwick, where I lived, all manner of life in between. I began to think about the idea of culture. I wanted mine to be simple and pure, but it seemed to me to be filled with difficulties and the problems of its existence as a subculture within the white domi nant culture full of haz ards. I wanted to be a poet. No. I wanted to be a certain kind of poet. Who could see the things that Rilke saw and experience the inward journey in the way that Rilke had. Yet I did not see how I could go to the inside places without bringing my history in with me — a history that created me and to which my art ought to be returned. I could not relinquish that history for any other people or past, but how could I be free, so tied to history and so tied to the politics of my life — a history and a politics that demanded allegiance to my people and not to some longdead poet of European descent?

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke told the poet that too much of life was for so many people a room from which they were afraid to leave because that room offered them security. They sat in the room and examined a small corner of it or the strip of the floor upon which they walk up and down and fail to feel out the unspeakable terrors or the shapes of their horri ble dungeons. Yet, a per son must experience everything and assume existence as broadly as it can be experienced. The cowardly refusal to do so is what has done us the greatest harm and has impoverished our being as individuals. I was not altogether sure how this could apply to me. I felt as if this reck less emphasis on the individual was surely a betrayal of my connec tion to my people — to Freddy, to my partners. And there was this problem too. If I were to go it alone and jump into all that was unknown, without the foundation of my past, who would there be to catch me should I falter?

More Than Enough Of The Night

I was 17. No longer really living at home but living nowhere else either. It was November. The wind blew off Lake Michigan, and I wrapped my coat, absent of buttons, tighter around me as I walked along the beach. It was night. The lights from the buildings along the Gold Coast sparkled and in the distance, the tall tower of the John Han cock Building stood like a metal beacon drawing the headlights of cars careening down Lake Shore Drive.

The wind howled and the waves leaped and twirled magnifi cently. But, I should have been somewhere inside, sitting by a fire, drinking cocoa, reading a book, the light from the lamp beside me giving the room a yellow glow. I should have had...the heat of...another human being...to warm me...the touch of...hands...the security of days and nights in which I felt protected and warm. But I had none of this. The waves whose touch would have chilled me. The lights whose warmth was far away.

I walked to the friend’s house where I stored a few of my books. I picked up my Rilke and went into the room off his back porch. It was a room used for storage, piled with old clothing, boxes, things broken and abandoned. I climbed beneath the pile of clothing.

• And if the earthly has
• forgotten you,
• say to the still earth: I
• flow.
• To the rapid water
• speak: I am.

Other poets have said more to me than has Rilke. And yet their more was not an essen tial more. Rilke’s value lies not in the ideas or thoughts or the mean ings of the words he writes but that he turns each poem into the jour ney that stands before us all. He could not make me dream; he could not send me a dream, and he could not become the dream itself. But through his eyes I have seen the object in the poem and its thought dwindle in importance compared to the “getting there,” with the writer turned into, becoming the writing and words scratched out on a piece of paper becoming the yielded self, planted. Rilke’s insistence on art as death, on beauty as the beginning of terror, on seduction by melancho lia, and other such con stant themes in his work, was surpassed by the ter rible rumbling ever pres ent that commanded the self be liberated. In liber ation, the intangible, the unidentifiable, the infi nite seen are thus the foundation upon which we stand. These — we who are on this earth can not make them end but through them we begin.

• There’s nowhere, my
• love
• the world can exist
• except within.
• Our lives are used up
• in transformations
• and what’s outside us
• always diminishing
• vanishes.

The poverty of my experiences that some might consider beneath them, Rilke salvaged. All that was unbearable, Rilke made me bear. Discovering the world inside myself, the prayer within that was my own, and understanding how they had come to me made what others assumed unembraceable, my ten der enveloping.

However much we are rooted in our histo ries and in the cultures that have created us, and however we define our responsibility toward that, history and culture are not diminished by nor in conflict with our rootedness inside our immeasurable longing. Instead, it is that longing that often tightens the bond to history and culture. It is the knowledge of the freedom inside that enables the chains to be seen more clearly. When I took what Rilke gave, it did not limit my relationship to my people but rather redefined that relationship, saying I was not from a history or a culture but rather was the history and the culture demanding freedom.

There are barriers between us all. Yes. The worst barrier is the one we create within our selves. That wall, broken down, is what will liberate the world.

I took Rilke, and me and Rilke, we went parading all around in grief, in sorrow, in joy, in love, in life, in death, hardly able sometimes to tell the difference between any of them, but we went on, striding and strutting from here to beyond and back again, and this was what it was all about, heh? This was w hat it was all about. Let’s begin again.