You Must Change Your Life

I don't know if the world's going to end. Someone said that the apocalypse (supposedly coming to theaters in November) doesn't mean we're all going to die. Just that the world as we know it will change.

And I've been wondering, well, how is it different from dying, just me, if I were to die? And so I ask myself if there's anything in my life I need to change. And what I've come to is no. I am doing everything I need to do. I am striving.

It's that point in the summer where it's too hot to wear much more than underwear in my apartment. Four fans and two window AC units barely put a dent in the sun. I endure. I occupy myself. I take cold showers, I live as myself in my skin. I write poems. I write. I apply. I go outside at night and stand in the breeze. Watch the fireflies hover above the grass in my backyard, wonder where they'll appear next in the dark.

Of course there are things I want that I don't have, places I want my life to go, but I'm working on them. I am living with the want and not letting it overtake me. Only a handful of years ago, I couldn't have said that. Would have been lying if I told you I wasn't miserable.

I'm not miserable. I changed—am changing—my life.

Archaic Torso of Apollo     (by Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell)

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.