|
KIT FRYATT
Trying to get home before the silence
because mandated grief is impossible
as mandated mourning repellent and
which the authorities want us to do or
perform unclear [edit]
Want to get home,
because to mourn one is to mourn all (is
that
right?) and makes of mourning perpetual.
Mourning cannot be always though grief
may:
terrible turning to say or hold nothing.
Tense forgetting people may not remember
to stop, looking up, as if idling, pull
over their cars. Instead of observing the
silence they might merely be watching it,
or thinking of a locution pertinent
rather to the last silence but one than
this, including a woman pregnant with
twins,
a curious obeisance to nothing
to do with that or this silence, or with
grief.
Can we grieve the unknown, without making
of them soldiers and other
abstractions?—I
think that’s a dreadful thing to do
to a
person. Were you also trying to get home
before the silence / you might have
glimpsed, from
the top deck of a bus, hidden fora, sites
of our cosmic childhoods, populated
by those discrete, distracted. Poised and
utter
as kouroi, they are thresheld, fleeting,
mute.
The first breath is air, the second fire,
the third,
if it comes, a gluey admixture of
ash and fat. Kneel down in the charnel,
in the
field of stelae or, as our nation calls
them, "sky-people". He
had an olive skin. The
bus opened up like splitting an olive.
Unless we learn that we are in the world
but
the reverse is wholly untrue, there will
be no silence in grieving, only quiet
|