Moving Forward on Fishes

A video setting of Rilke's poem "Moving Forward" as well as my “Song” (from Moon Baboon Canoe) that I created for an aerial dance performance some time ago. Rilke’s poem was translated by Robert Bly who I once took a class with and he told me—I was 16—that I had a beautiful face. He told me this in the context of consoling a friend who was weeping during the workshop where we had to write about a rock as if it were our father.

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Robert Bly