Theme Week 11: In Its Entirety
We travel this distance you and I, daily, sometimes hourly. I watch you move towards and I back away. You eye me standing close and turn. There’s a moment each time that feels close, like it could come to pass without our consent or acknowledgement. But it doesn’t and it won’t because it can’t. You stay there. I’ll be here. You play those dice and I’ll stick to my house of cards. I won’t let the moments pass aware until I am unaware that the moment has passed at all. You can wrap up your time in its pretty little box and put it back there behind the beer in the fridge. Bring it out for company’s sake on those nights when there’s little else to talk about. I’ll keep the car and you take what’s left. We can separate everything down to the bones of it if you’d like and walk away knowing that we stood our ground piece by piece. I won’t waste time thinking of guilt and you can leave your blame sitting squarely on top of that box. Neither of us will touch it. There is no coming back to this spot. With my panicked storm of “No more! No more!” I renounced the road back and burned the dirt floor of memories. You smile that smile that I detest and say, “We’ll see”.
1178 days have passed since “we’ll see”. Blame still sits on a box though even guilt has grown bored with its rants. Every now and then I sit and look on the edge of that charred road back and I’ve seen the green sprigs of hope that you’ve planted. But there is no back.
“Love” you said “will be what brings you home.” You were wrong. I wonder at that love. Wonder at the potency of a charm that only sparkles in the sun. Maybe, if I were younger still and you more handsome I would rest these laurels on that faint sparkle and, calling it magic consider you again my god. But I am not younger and your face has grown tired in your hunt. The crack shows. The whores show. And not even the love that you profess could clean the dirt from under your nails.
“You only wish you could be bitter. You’ll come back ‘round, eventually.” Those were your words. 1177 days later, those were your words. I wonder at their truth. I am not so bitter as to be blind. I have proven to myself that I am still capable of love and passion and want. I just don’t think that includes you anymore. Remember though when it did? There’s some sadness in that lack, that absence in me. I gave you some pretty good love though I’m not so sure anymore that it was the best of what’s left in me.
So you go back there and do that. And I’m going to stay right here for a while and do this. Not yet, but one day I’m going to be ready to love that kind of love again. You too. Each of us with others. And I think we should both stop counting the days since we left, each our own distance.
This...this is done. Even the cigarette is ended.
1178 days have passed since “we’ll see”. Blame still sits on a box though even guilt has grown bored with its rants. Every now and then I sit and look on the edge of that charred road back and I’ve seen the green sprigs of hope that you’ve planted. But there is no back.
“Love” you said “will be what brings you home.” You were wrong. I wonder at that love. Wonder at the potency of a charm that only sparkles in the sun. Maybe, if I were younger still and you more handsome I would rest these laurels on that faint sparkle and, calling it magic consider you again my god. But I am not younger and your face has grown tired in your hunt. The crack shows. The whores show. And not even the love that you profess could clean the dirt from under your nails.
“You only wish you could be bitter. You’ll come back ‘round, eventually.” Those were your words. 1177 days later, those were your words. I wonder at their truth. I am not so bitter as to be blind. I have proven to myself that I am still capable of love and passion and want. I just don’t think that includes you anymore. Remember though when it did? There’s some sadness in that lack, that absence in me. I gave you some pretty good love though I’m not so sure anymore that it was the best of what’s left in me.
So you go back there and do that. And I’m going to stay right here for a while and do this. Not yet, but one day I’m going to be ready to love that kind of love again. You too. Each of us with others. And I think we should both stop counting the days since we left, each our own distance.
This...this is done. Even the cigarette is ended.
posted by millay | 11/14/2005 09:39:00 AM
2 Comments:
The poetry here--the mysterious but almost graspable* metaphors--comes very thick and fast but not so t & f as to lose your reader.
And when it's time to reorient the reader, you give us something very solid--that smile the writer detests, for example, or one of the quotations.
* 'Almost graspable' --I think of temporal lobe disturbances such as
epileptic petit mals or ecstatic mysticism when I read those strings of metaphors. The petit mal victim feels that if only, if only the wheel would stop spinning for a second, everything in the universe would be clear. Those metaphors are like that: private but almost public.
This piece does work for week 11 and here's why: ordinarily, the epistolary mode with its comfortable 'you' is designed to inveigle and cajole the reader. But here, each you is designed to assault the reader who is
constantly barraged with accusations and sneers and who is constantly in a state of self-defense, saying, "Whoa, it ain't me who did all that bad stuff, not me!'
In other words, you push the reader away by using a technique designed to win him over. In other words, mission accomplished: alienation.
Any of us who've ever counted the days, weeks, months, and years since the departure or death of a beloved person must feel the sting in all those days the writer has counted and the even fiercer sting of no more counting at the end--that would kick away the last prop....
All semester I've been eager to see
confessional writing turned into art and artifact, to use it to make something beyond itself, which you certainly have done and which this certainly is.
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