Antique

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed.
It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

--Robert Pinsky's "Antique"

I had meant to post this poem since a long time ago. I don't know why I forgot to. There is something in its meaning I wish to understand better. Like drowning in a fire and burning in a river. Of having you. Who are you? What does it mean to have someone? And I am left hanging, bereft of a verb in the twelfth line. (Yet I did not come to know this until the third time I read it.) So the frame must be more beautiful than you for that someone in the horrid future buys the picture, but why are you being studied so, that he will keep you? And the verb harbor. Harbor: v. 1. to keep (a thought or feeling, typically a negative one) in one's mind, esp. secretly 2. to give a home or shelter to. You must have lost the battle and hence  become anonymous--perhaps why your are less beautiful. But are you alive? Or are you kept alive by that someone--become an antique relic of a past? 

March 24, 2010

I want to right write all over the page with feverish speed and intensity, like how I imagine Beethoven to have written his music. I wish I wouldn't hesitate too much lest I misspell or write crookedly. I wish this ink were infinite and time irrelevant to the clock. I wish my hand would never fail this pen. I wish this pen would never fail you--my reader.
     "But perfection is my enemy." --Francesca Battistelli's "Free"

Journal entry dated March 24, 2010

It's so funny I misspelled "write" the first time I wrote this. Perhaps I wished to write right. 

Sea Level

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us


all these years—

the dry, white spot that opens like a moon at the back of the throat


the quieted tongue, the last of all words.

Our ever-faithful dinner guest—who kept her wet fingers lined up at the edge


of the world, who politely folded and refolded her napkin—stops 


passing the peas, leans back quietly into her chair to watch

what we'll do now. She's done, the sea quits, stands without comment on the shore, is


just another dumb, beautiful animal considering the cliff, the final leap 


back into itself.

At least say we were among those who kept the conversation up for so long—


you and I handed always and never back and forth again and again

while our arms distressed the surface.


Let's just say the table was too large, that we lifted the heaviest dish


and got tired—

that only the ocean knows how to spoon salt over a great distance


under any kind of light. 

--"Sea Level" by Kim Van Voorhees

Mrs. Bell, you're finally published! I was doing calculus drawing the polar curve of r=4sin2x when I suddenly remembered to google you! I listened to you reading it and I read it again (and again) and your poem is just lovely--I am officially your fan. I am going to write it in my journal tonight and will probably be very tempted to rip it out and keep it in my pocket or something--or I might even memorize it. But that's okay with you, right, because I'm your fan? 

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