Concerning Rilke

  Andrew the waiter appeared as if summoned, bestowing coffee and beignets. “Someone sent these back so you might as well have them.”
  “You’ve been well-trained, Dublin,” Kevin said with the ghost of a social smile.
  “Look, this kind of relates to when we talked earlier,” Ivy told him as Andrew left. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have the words I wanted to say.”
  “It’s okay,” Kevin said, and he meant it.
  “Rilke says you’ll live your way into the answer,” she continued. “Without realizing it.”
  “Nothing like a good German existentialist for hitting the nail.”
  “But it takes living in the question now, and the point is to live in everything. And that’s not something you see, just something you know among everyone’s interpretations. Like, well, like with love. I don’t really have a better example. There’s no destination, you just recognize where you are, and whatever lines other people draw don’t matter.”
  Kevin was silent, not from a lack of words but too many, jostling for a purchase in his mind. Then a sliver of poetry fell into his brain like a shaft of pure sunlight, and maybe he no longer feared but he felt his lips forming the words into quotation. Nerdua.
  “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved:
  “In secret, between the shadow and the soul.
  “I love you as the plant that never blooms,
  “But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.”