Rilke Renditions: 1

A stink arose — Boom! — or maybe an O, sang Orpheus, as he

yearned toward his Big Mistake. What horror! What a Blockage of the

earways! Oh, and as the verse-writing gang got steadily closer —

fanged, winking, full of wanderlust, a vortex 

turning on the same old Still Point — we really tore up

that dungeon, he continued, like a clarion call from the lost world

of Lager and Goodnight. I mean they’d studied Aust Lit and might

still be trying its Ne’ers and Nots in an Angst of leased warrens

surrounded by Holdens, Borrowed Schlock, Garrotting —

you can see it in their kindly arts prizes. But what an About Turn

they faced — the long climb from Hades, and all those wars

against the Emphatic Ones, the Underschleppers, the drunken

Verlaine gang, the intermittent Kazoo gang — foppish imposters

the lot, dross, old shoes fit for anyone who hoards them!