Histoire
Dawn Potter
The usual thing:
Time stood still for years, then fell off the table.
This is a portrait of what I was, and wasn’t.
Parched throat, tears exploding.
I stumbled over every cat on the stairs.
Who else could I be?
Twenty-six letters equaled
not enough words.
There was sleep. And simple memory.
I sewed Simplicity patterns and wished for beauty.
But what is perfume that no one opens?
When I lifted my violin, the men at the bar
begged for Skynyrd, not Coltrane.
So I volunteered to be lonely.
[first published in On the Seawall (2023)]
2 comments:
Damn.
That hits hard.
I am again in awe.
I just started reading Rilke's _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_ and found an amazing passage about poets. I can't type it all, but here is the ending:
"And it is not enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves--only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."
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