The next poem is called "The Aliens."
And it's about the people who come to visit you late at night
with troubles on their mind.
And it has a epigraph from Rilke,
which is almost as long as the poem actually.
But Rilke always seems to come.
When it comes to problems between people,
he always seems to come right there and say what's necessary.
And this comes from his fictional autobiography
called The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, which is a lovely book.
The poem is called "The Aliens".
I could simply write the history of my neighbors.
To be sure, it would really be the case history
of the symptoms they caused in me.
But this they have in common with all such creatures.
They can only be inferred from the disturbances
they create in certain tissues.
These are real people.
Shy as mice they tap and never go away.
They enter our houses and private lives.
Our heart should receive them, we tell ourselves like blood.
They lunge at us, smiles like wrinkled fruit.
Whole bodies quiver in terror of greetings.
Their souls crawl out.
One tells a story of wet tears in a paper bag
who would cry all night.
And one has a desire for motherhood, a dark pillow
releasing its feathers.
They dis-attach like embryos of how they could have lived
had the world been right.
Light rests on our shoulders.
Often it seems we want to fall asleep.
They are our bad dreams, the jinns of our crippled children.
If we love them, we cry out with a real longing
for these are the creatures our dying parents dreamed of.
Wide eyed and naked, serious as opera,
they beg for a small piece of our lives,
what we might have been.