Bruce Ross

If No Angel

His self-written epitaph expresses delight in a rose’s beauty. What if no angel, to allude to the first lines of his Duino Elegies, were here to meet his soul hovering over the planted roses, his joy, with so many petal-eyes of pure beauty, so awake, to allude to the epitaph. His spirit would look beyond out from the simple Raron graveyard tucked behind this mountaintop castle church, as I look, pure pleasure in grassy mountains behind grassy mountains beyond and beyond and the valley below, from this jutting rock, pure pleasure and beyond. He died of leukemia but felt he would die of blood poisoning from having been pricked by a rose thorn. I left him then a simple token of beauty.

Rilke’s grave
a rose left behind
without thorns

Rilkes Grab
eine Rose zuruckgelassen
ohn Dornen