Mister Chu is reading
Rainer Rilke, on Pemaquid Beach, watching over a Boy Child who (under Mister Chu’s protection) is busy gathering together a collection of single crab legs (mostly meatless and discarded by the winged murderers who detached them).
Rilke talks of sleigh rides in Bremen (not the New England one sitting a few short miles away) and Mister Chu wonders which German it was and how they arrived hereabouts to name the land they saw after the one they’d left behind.
Rilke also talks of drinking warm milk (he is unwell) in a cafe on the Montparnasse, not far from the Cimetière where Baudelaire was buried eight years before Rainer Maria was born. The sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi (who was himself born within a month of two of Rilke in early 1876) is also resting in Montparnasse, as are Satre, de Beauvoir, Beckett and Sontag. A fine foursome to listen to, arguing or otherwise.
These objects, the cow’s liquid, the famous place of its consumption, and the nearby graves, each well occupied, seem very far away.
“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” -Rilke
