Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, August 30th, 2004.

Today's poem is by Scott Cairns, from his new collection of poetry, Lacunae, out from Pericles Press.

It's called Change Your Life.

And it is a kind of ectfrastic poem. It's a poem in conversation with another poem. In fact, the epigraph to the poem reads, after Rilke's archaic

torso of Apollo. And if you're a long-time listener of the Daily Poem, you have heard that poem

featured on the show before.

I'll read it again today for context before reading Karen's own poem, which responds to, interrogates, and then deepens Rilka's original.

So here is Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

And the torso that Rilke is describing is a piece of sculpture missing all of its limbs,

arms cut off below the shoulder, legs cut off below the hips or mid thigh, and head cut off at the

natural place where one would cut off the head. So just a torso here, but sometimes that's enough.

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit,

and yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp in which his gaze now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so,

nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise, this stone would seem defaced, beneath the

translucent cascade of the shoulders, and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur. Would not,

from all the borders of itself, burst like a star? For here there is no

place that does not see you. You must change your life. And now, as if that poem weren't enough

...