Sunday, March 6, 2016

Sunday Morning



Spooning crunchy little potatoes into my mouth, a sip of a latte, the whine of the boy next to me on the bench, his mother's soft Indian-inflected chiding. A couple walked in and up to the counter, his clothes rumpled, her hair a mat. I knew where they'd been, maybe minutes before. My own crumpled bed, the first night in twenty-one years where I lay without Sophie in the room across the hall. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The first morning, too. Hesitation to write it thus for all that is implied. Sex and death but neither. I might have woken once or twice, alert, then sunk back into sleep, she resting at her father's. Why must I always mark the days? I'm reading a short story and there's a boy and a school and a teacher and a drawer and in it some stars and I look up from my latte and see those tiny golden stars, foil on slick white, so many stars to a sheet to want to wait to earn. Stars unbidden and bidden, hidden yet.



Blanche McCarthy

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces—the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.

Look, in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search 
The glare of revelations going by!

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.

Wallace Stevens, from The Palm at the End of the Mind, Selected Poems and a Play



10 comments:

  1. This is heart breaking and gorgeously described. And Wallace Stevens! Je l'adore.

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  2. "His mother's soft Indian-inflected chiding..."

    My favorite part.

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  3. i adore everything about this post. So much said in so few words. what a mystery this life is.

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  4. It's weird, waking up alone after so many years not-alone. I continue to be filled with a mixture of guilt and relief and that silence--it has remained strange and luminous both.

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  5. "Stars unbidden and bidden, hidden yet." What a luminous last line. Wonderful writing. x0 N2

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  6. Such melancholy beauty, the writing exquisite, yours and the poem. You are making your world anew.

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  7. She resting at her fathers? Something? Somewhere?

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  8. As for the poem, we're star dust yeah? So that sounds about right. And i agree, the dead glass on the wall is only good for a cursory shell inspection.

    Do we all have revelations? Or do some of us just achieve slightly-less muddled levels of understanding that only beget more questions?...
    But the dark! Well you can't see the rest of the stars in the sunshine, but moonshine and star light leave some warmth to be desired. There's hope in them, but not much to warm our ebony, or olive, or pasty exteriors. Maybe some of us have to learn to navigate more by the stars than others. My mind is in the gutter and my soul probably spends a little too much time in the dark of those glades. [Oops?]

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