Case Study: The Nature of the Disease

Case Study: The Nature of the Disease


"Outbreaks of anger were rare
but they did occur and were very
violent. Kind and considerate--
yes; but anyone at all skilled in
reading faces knew from the features
of this man that there were demons
lurking behind, storms waiting to be let loose . . . ."

J. R. Von Salis, about Rilke
These words. Not about himself. But they could have been taken from one of his tombstones.


The deep angers. The shames.
The inadequacies that caused those terrors,
had him hurtling through night-long madness,

destruction. Yet he rose again, still
haunted, his face pale with moon,
his eyes nothing he cared to examine.

The sick certainty as sunrise found
his hands shaking, hope all dead:
within him the long high wail of banshee

that old dead piper who shattered the world
he had hid his darker self, wolf, within.


II
If somewhere within those nights sanity
were to return (if only in the morning, briefly
and friends came to know that hidden man
as too strange to be loved, if the whole world
(what there was that was his) found out he
had no love for himself, thus little for others

--would one or two wonder why he clung to rites
hoped that in simple evening chants he might find
a quiet, some peace, and understand?

He came not to believe it. It was after all
in the contradiction, the twin faces shouting
against each other. . .an evil can be

withstood, perhaps forgiven. But he half-face
of light, half of dark . . . who would care
to meet him, hold him on the quiet street
where all true strangers walk?

Keith Wilson