Robert Harlow
Hearing What You Want to Hear
I misheard the poet reading Rilke’s
famous line, “You must change your life,”
from “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”
Poor me, I’ve read it often enough
to know the reader didn’t get it wrong
but thought I heard him say,
“You must change your wife.”
And she was sitting by my side
when he looked up from the page
and right at me, or so it seemed,
so I was almost certain
he said what I thought he said,
reading my mind from a short distance away.
A few months earlier she said,
“You can do anything you want with me,”
an offer I understood then
on a whole different level
than I took it to mean now,
backed up by the revised Rilke line.
When I walked away, did she understand
I was taking her up on her offer?
Resonance
Mis-typing made me say the light was shadow
when I meant to say shallow.
But that’s o.k., either one will fit,
because each is true--literally
and metaphorically--which is also o.k.
Locked into place, they have a resonance
that arises, each echoing the other.
Does this make them more true in the literal sense,
or are they like most poems, true and false?
But false in the best way—true in the poem.
Shadows aren’t always shallow, as in slender
or not fully developed, because of fading light,
but nothing shallow can claim a shadow,
so, shallows, water that is not deep,
cannot cast one, but the light that trembles on
and below the surface can change what you see
in the best way, as in something that might be true,
even if it’s not, when said in a poem.
Robert Harlow resides in upstate New York. His most recent book of poems--Places Near and Far--was published by Louisiana Literature in 2018. His poems appear in Bottomknots, Aethlon, Poetry Northwest, Cottonwood, The Midwest Quarterly, and many other journals. He is a professional stilt walker.