Andrew Grace: “Said Gun (2)”
As I lowered the match / I thought how loss is assured
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As I lowered the match / I thought how loss is assured
Of course there is another world. But it is not elsewhere.
A little later she and I are alone in the room, / nearly ourselves again, together gathering the meager fruits / and meditating on the empty party
I have nothing to say. I am a recording machine, / a listening device.
I wrote “Confession” in the winter, recently after I had moved from Iowa City to Cambridge, MA. I’d moved from a rambling attic apartment with secret unfinished rooms to a partially furnished attic studio with a shared bathroom down the hall. My writing space was the floor. The convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy contains small, individual cells, like a beehive, that monks would use for devotion. Each cell is bare save for a simple fresco by the early Renaissance master Fra Angelico. My room in Cambridge hardly had a monastic aesthetic; books and clothes were piled in geological strata. Every so often, I would find a bee feebly circling around the lampshade, or a couple of dead bees in the windowsill. “Confession” came to me after receiving a phone call very early in the morning from a friend whom I hadn’t spoken with in months. I don’t know why she chose that morning. She was in a difficult relationship, unhappy, isolated, yet surrounded by a city; I was feeling adrift and lonely, uncertain …
Let us eat nothing but darkness / refuse our stale orbit / and walk only in sleep
and you in jersey gown and bare feet seek the same spot
Like all captured life / this one fails / to reveal the picture.
We all quit dancing / To look.
The form itself gives me hope.