There is a poem that says everything. This poem sums up every feeling I ever have had. I have had a tab open of this poem on my phone and I read parts of it periodically all the time. On rarer occasions, I read the whole thing. It’s a very long poem, but it’s one of the most perfect things I’ve ever read.
My friend and I discovered this poem and ever since we have categorized people as either being Poem People or not Poem People. It’s VERY rare anyone I send the poem to read the whole thing. Even rarer they come back to me screaming at the injustice of them only finding the poem at this stage in their life.
The Glass Essay by Anne Carson. (The entire thing can be found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178364)
I’m just going to post a few (or a lot) of my favorite parts here. I won’t post any commentary with it, because I think it’s better that way, but very very favorite lines are bolded.
I can hear little clicks inside my dream.
Night drips its silver tap
down the back.
At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking
of the man who
left in September.
His name was Law.
_______________________________________
My mother speaks suddenly.
That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it?
You aren’t getting over him.
My mother has a way of summing things up.
She never liked Law much
but she liked the idea of me having a man and getting on with life.
Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out,
was all she said after she met him.
Give and take were just words to me
at the time. I had not been in love before.
It was like a wheel rolling downhill.
________________________________________________
I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too.
She knows how to hang puppies,
that Emily.
It isn’t like taking an aspirin you know, I answer feebly.
Dr. Haw says grief is a long process.
She frowns. What does it accomplish
all that raking up the past?
Oh—I spread my hands—
I prevail! I look her in the eye.
She grins. Yes you do.
_____________________________
Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,
I am thinking as I stride over the moor.
_______________________________
Something inside it reminds me of childhood—
it is the light of the stalled time after lunch
when clocks tick
and hearts shut
and fathers leave to go back to work
and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering
something they never tell.
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.
____________________________________
Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
I can feel that other day running underneath this one
like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner
up the hill to his house, shadows
of limes and roses blowing in the car window
and music spraying from the radio and him
singing and touching my left hand to his lips.
Law lived in a high blue room from which he could see the sea.
Time in its transparent loops as it passes beneath me now
still carries the sound of the telephone in that room
and traffic far off and doves under the window
chuckling coolly and his voice saying,
You beauty. I can feel that beauty’s
heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue room—
No, I say aloud. I force my arms down
through air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water
and the videotape jerks to a halt
like a glass slide under a drop of blood.
I stop and turn and stand into the wind,
which now plunges towards me over the moor.
When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die.
This is not uncommon.
________________________________
The last time I saw Law was a black night in September.
Autumn had begun,
my knees were cold inside my clothes.
A chill fragment of moon rose.
He stood in my living room and spoke
without looking at me. Not enough spin on it,
he said of our five years of love.
Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces
which floated apart. By now I was so cold
it was like burning. I put out my hand
to touch his. He moved back.
I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.
Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back.
He moved onto me.
Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself
thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.
There was no area of my mind
not appalled by this action, no part of my body
that could have done otherwise.
__________________
But Emily knew how to catch a devil.
She put into him in place of a soul
the constant cold departure of Catherine from his nervous system
every time he drew a breath or moved thought.
She broke all his moments in half,
with the kitchen door standing open.
I am not unfamiliar with this half-life.
But there is more to it than that.
________________________________
The sound
startles me back into the dream I was having
this morning when I awoke,
one of those nightlong sweet dreams of lying in Law’s
arms like a needle in water—it is a physical effort
to pull myself out of his white silk hands
as they slide down my dream hips—I
turn and face into the wind
and begin to run.
Goblins, devils and death stream behind me.
In the days and months after Law left
I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.
I had no home in goodness anymore.
To see the love between Law and me
turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another
towards some other hunger was terrible.
Perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought.
But what love could be prior to it?
What is prior?
What is love?
My questions were not original.
Nor did I answer them.
___________________________
She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not
go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.
___________________________________
Well, there are different definitions of Liberty.
Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying.
I took this to be more a wish than a thought
and changed the subject.
But blank lines do not say nothing.
As Charlotte puts it,
“The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives
with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse,
strikes me as a proceeding which,
however well meant, is weak and futile.
I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares—
what horror it conceals.”
__________________________
I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast
whether she had a good night
and is about to say a happy thing
or not.
Not.
_________________________
This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments,
from what I call The Rules Of Life series.
_______________________
At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta
and may advance along one of three channels.
There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel,
the Stubborn As Your Father channel
and random channel.
______________________
I t is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love—
blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger.
I clamber along to find the source.
_____________
Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,
pouring up the vents.
Every night I wake to this anger,
the soaked bed,
the hot pain box slamming me each way I move.
I want justice. Slam.
I want an explanation. Slam.
I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. Slam.
__________________________
The vocation of anger is not mine.
I know my source.
It is stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.
I switch off the lamp and lie on my back,
thinking about Emily’s cold young soul.
Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young
there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally
disappear—
________________________________
My education, I have to admit, has been gappy.
The basic rules of male-female relations
were imparted atmospherically in our family,
no direct speech allowed.
________________________
A great icicle formed on the railing of my balcony
so I drew up close to the window and tried peering through the icicle,
hoping to trick myself into some interior vision,
but all I saw
was the man and woman in the room across the street
making their bed and laughing.
________________________
I lived my life,
which felt like a switched-off TV.
Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.
_________________________
How to Not Make it in Your 20s 