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Paula Becker to Rainer Maria Rilke,
September 1900, Worpswede
Black sails: greased and tarred –
Black sails of boats laden with turf –
They glide down the river –
I see them sliding through
trees – Black sails
between sunlit patches
of birch bark –
Every day the light pulls me
out further – somewhere
further outside of myself –
Today I think these boats
come out of hell – dripping with black blood
from the moors –
dragging out
the smell of marshlands,
of rotting leaves –
You tell me
we must learn
how to welcome back
the dead – they are always there, you say,
and we must learn to live with them –
Even now, some days
they pull out corpses
from the bog –
Dead bodies
from Roman times – their tired wrinkles
seem to sweat –
Later
we bury them in the churchyard –
Is that a true way
of welcoming?
Perhaps the turf I burn
once covered the face of a woman –
This turf, grown thick
and rich against her skin –
A woman
who might have looked like me –
Perhaps tonight
I will burn bits of her hair
without truly knowing that I do –
Hair that might have been
as long as mine –
Now lost, peat entangled,
peat ensnared – prickly
with moss and rough seeds –
A married woman
who took a lover –
You told me how
they punished her:
Face down, naked
they made her lie
down on the moor,
in the wettest part of the bogland –
all the tender parts of her body
tightening against the coldness –
all her pores curled and puckered
in anguish –
Then,
the farmhands stepped on her –
the largest men walked over her
stamping her into the mud –
The stickiness taking her in –
How the air must have hummed
seething around her –
Even the mud
seething with her soul –
This brownish black Worpswede mud –
how strong, how dark
it must have been
a thousand years ago – The stickiness
taking her in –
A glistening being –
Did she still think
it was Mother Earth?
Her nose, mouth, ears
stuffed shut with spongy loam –
They stamped on her
until she was deep enough –
Their own legs covered with mud.
You say, betrayal
is too simple a word –
Too convenient
to call it adultery –
You tell me even now
you can see her face –
hear what she felt
centuries ago:
fear, disgust, anger –
her distorted face stays with you –
Then, stays with me
as if she were a black rose
you had pressed for me –
as if I must keep her
for you –
as if I have no choice –
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