define life

Every single one of Terrance Hayes' American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is absolutely fucking stellar. I posted one last year, and I'm posting another one this year, but I really recommend the whole book. I like posting sonnets with other sonnets because I love looking at all the things the form can do. Sonnets are magic!! Hayes' sonnet (which I'm posting for today) also directly references the Rilke sonnet I'm posting as a make-up poem for April 16. And if you've been around here at basically any point in the past 18 (?!?!) years of poetry posts, you know I love poetry in conversation with other poetry.

Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo" saying
"You must change your life." James Wright ends "Lying
In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life." Ruth Stone ends
"A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
And beginning of life. After the opening scene where
A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life. A shootout
In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
A barn shootout endangering the farm life. I live a life
That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
That makes me weep for another life. Define life.

—Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" ["Rilke ends his sonnet"] from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018).

*

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.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), "Archaic Torso of Apollo," in this case from Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell and published by Modern Library (1995).