I'm up too late and everything feels so unresolved. This was a very eventful weekend and I should talk about it or anything else but I just feel so blurry and vague. I've not been sleeping well.
So here is the end of my favorite poem, at least my favorite poem that I always think of this time of year, which I have almost certainly posted here before. Being Pharoh, Beckian Fritz Goldberg. The reason I like this poem is because it resonates with blurry emotional nonsense. I like how quiet and understated it is and how it builds up to great heights. In the same poem, although not the portion I quote below, she says this line: "I"m an unforgivably domestic mourner" and I don't think anybody else has exactly articulated so well how it feels to be in a terrible grim mood while doing some mundane household chore as that--domestic mourning. Maybe it's time to scrub my sideboards.
It is August. One woman is so long
longing does not come out of her.
But this time I have loved you
so long I become
the boy you were. I must still
be alive for everything is changing and
incomplete. Half a tree, half
drives its shadowy web near the shutters.
August has just turned September. The ancestors
want 4,000 year old grain, hard as quartz,
in grain jars. All I have are cigarettes.
What a night this is. What a night.
I'll lie down and my pillow will thrum
like a machine. I'll go barefoot
to the window, see if any light is
still on in any house. Who else
is afraid of missing something. Who else
knows one thing God can't enter
is my memory: I, a minor
twentieth century poet, the first
of September, 4 am, finish one thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment