Presentation #2127, With Rilke

Rilke of ten thousand shadows, slant-rhyming death-gold, come where Dylan Thomas drank, at Stag and Deer Inn under the ruby-eyed tiger-head. Recite correspondence of Zeus and Hera detailing eight hundred years. Again Zeus’s thunderhead will detonate. Other gods will laugh at humanity’s lost cubist musicians, our actresses with four mansions on three continents. But don’t damn our string quartets, balalaikas, dense fugues and astronauts watching earth’s ultramarine strand drop away. Zeus himself admires earth as a green steel raindrop. O lift a last bracing whiskey at Stag and Deer Inn and eternize this moment, Rainer Rilke.