The End
Aditi Machado
the end —and now what? Am I changed? Is the world?
I’ve lifted myself off the page and what sort of gesture is
this? It isn’t especially dramatic, it happens simply, and I
mark it. Poems do end, at least materially.
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the end: “You must change your life.”
I must change my life!
I must read the poem and change my life.
Hah.
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but is that the poem’s end?1 I re-read and now it says some-
thing like you must, at all times, endlessly, change your life.
You cannot not change your life.
The poem is Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
in the English translation by Stephen Mitchell. In it a
grand sculpture of the Greek god Apollo stands before the
eyes—grander, it would seem, and more ruinously beauti-
ful for its lack of head, arms, and legs. “We cannot know,”
the poem begins. “We cannot know his legendary head /
with eyes like ripening fruit.”
That is to say, we begin not-knowing. The absent head
confronts us and names us in our unknowing. How should
we look upon this headless thing, “we” who have heads?
The torso is so big, it is as though our heads are atilt, study-
ing the empty space above the severed neck and chiseling
into it the impossible eyes looking back at us.
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. …
Compressed in Apollo’s torso lie the features of his miss-
ing head. A gaze materializes in it; there is a smile in the
musculature around the genitals, and everywhere radi-
ant hair. Everything is getting magnified. The stone isn’t
1 End as boundary in space and time, but also end as purpose.
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simply gleaming, it’s “burst[ing] like a star” “from all the
borders of itself”—the torso is erupting out of its own mate-
rial and the dim gaze that once was now gleams multiply
out of multiple eyes: “there is no place / that does not see
you.” In the demotic, you feel so seen.
You must change your life.
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“archaic torso of apollo” is a sonnet. Rilke wrote it
in 1908 while working for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It is
considered an ekphrastic of a fifth-century BCE sculpture
called Torso of a Youth from Miletus presently located in
the Louvre. Mitchell’s translation of it is composed in loose
iambics with enough consonance and assonance to say a
sonnet-like pattern of end rhyme (ABAB CDCD EFE EFE)
has been achieved: head/inside, torso/low, Otherwise/
thighs, could/flared, defaced/fur/itself/life, shoulders/place.
Sonnets tend toward completion. Structurally, both the
Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms whittle down (4-4-
3-3 or 4-4-4-2) and synthesize toward a statement of some
kind—the resolution of an argument. Thought arrives in
tandem with the feeling of it having arrived. So it is with
Rilke’s sonnet. It is also the case that here the ostensibly
complete form of the sonnet accommodates the incom-
plete—broken—body of Apollo which, in the process of its
contemplation by “us”—by “you”—becomes complete. And
then more than complete. So complete that it obliterates
itself out of completion, returning “(y)our” gaze with an
injunction of such intensity it eviscerates you and me, the
human, the living, the changeable. The torso is not incom-
plete—you are incomplete. Your manners and perceptions,
your knowing, the sense you have of your own life—all
incomplete.
Rilke is no televangelist. He’s more like a theologian of
negation. In his poem the torso becomes legible as its
awe-some self by way of repeated denials, deferrals, and
negations that test our grappling with what is not coming
to be known. In grammar every truth (there is no head)
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meets its counter-truth (there, a head). Grammar dangles
before us the alternatives:
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.
In addition, therefore, to the brilliantly radiating torso,
grammar procures the torso that does not dazzle us, does
not smile, appears defaced, remains unglistening, does not
explode, and which maps the “no place” (utopia) that does
not look at you so that you don’t feel seen. Must you still
change your life? I think so.
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“ eyes like ripening fruit ”; “ that dark place
where procreation flared ”: On the one hand, full-
ness, fertility, and excess. On the other, brokenness,
barrenness, and nothing. You come to learn and what
you learn is that something is wrong, something is miss-
ing. “You must change your life.” Maybe you change it, then
you come back to the poem and are told to change it again.
Change is endless. The poem staggers on the cusp of know-
ing what it is to be complete while remaining incomplete.
The end of the poem is there is no end. There is only the
rest of time. The future.
Sometimes I think it means the final change: “You must
change your life into death.” Be like me, counsels stone-dead
Apollo with his graven posture and rampant, maggoty eyes.
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these days I write only long poems. To compose a ten-line
poem, say, with a good first and a devastating last line—
it doesn’t move me. Though, of course, poems do have last
lines and sometimes the last line devastates. But that’s not
(really) the (only) end of a poem. The poem’s end is to endure.
I’ll write the same poem for weeks or months at a time,
composing almost every day at roughly the same time of
day. It’s like extending a single annotation over an obdu-
rate duration.2 I write to discover a form, but the form is
also discovering the language and the thinking, and it
happens out of order. (Lyn Hejinian in “The Rejection of
Closure”: “Form is not a fixture but an activity.”) It is not
decided in advance what the thinking will be, but inklings
of sensuous and nonsensuous matters have been amassed
in preparation. The system to writing is rhythm. Prosody
prompts me to find ample instants of acuity to put together
a structure in which thought and feeling can proceed/
regress with and against the methods of time. Then I
rewrite for one year or several years. I rewrite by hand and
practice the shapes of the text as I reshape it. The phrase
“No precision that isn’t imprecision” haunts my practice.
The whole thing drips with time.
2 A phrase I adapt from Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Edmond
Jabès’s The Book of Yukel: “I am more obdurate than duration.”
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nevertheless, this essay reads almost exclusively short
poems. Short poems emitting signals in smog toward some
alien enterprise I claim as mine.
Longform practice wants to extend signals and “hazard
improvisations.” 3 It wants to answer calls from the crumbs
of lyrics and rippling exteriors of institutions. It wants to
think beyond its own time.
Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger:
thread suns
above the grey-black wilderness.
A tree-
high thought
tunes in to light’s pitch: there
are still songs to be sung on the other side
of mankind.
3 Deleuze and Guattari (tr. Massumi): “One launches forth, hazards an im-
provisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or to meld with it.”
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nevertheless, there are short poems (imagine this were
an actual taxonomy: short poems and long poems, and an
arbitrary number of lines that arbitrates it: twelve? fifteen?
seventy-one? I amuse myself) whose signals, if I can help
it, I avoid.
Superficially, James Wright’s “I have wasted my life” sounds
not too different from Rilke’s/Mitchell’s “You must change
your life,” but actually it is different in almost every way. I
used to teach this poem (from The Branch Will Not Break,
published in 1963) when I first began teaching poetry writ-
ing courses. I think I taught it because it belonged to the
unofficial anthology of teachable poems one inherits when
one becomes a writing instructor. Also, I think I taught it
because maybe then I liked it, or thought I did, and at the
very least found it useful in its imitability:
Lying on a Blanket in Forest Park in Saint Louis, Missouri
Above, I see the orange hot air balloon
Half-asleep in the grey-blue sky,
Dawdling like a shadow the color of eaves.
Down by the ditch near the new prairie grasses,
Yogis follow one another
Into the distances of the …
If this4 is too cruel, then may I at least point out that
4 The title of the poem is actually “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s
Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” The poem goes: “Over my head, I see the
bronze butterfly, / Asleep on the black trunk, / Blowing like a leaf in green
shadow. / Down the ravine behind the empty house, / The cowbells follow
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