 |
| In Daniel Chester French's Studio |
After Dusting a Bookshelf
Tell me how long this small chocolate
egg has been perched on Robert
Lowell’s Collected Poems ready for the find,
sitting on his spine, edging his ladies’
man eye-
brow? Missed. When? Last Easter? Easter
before? There was a
time, when he was
manic, and maybe even between
manias, that he believed
in Easter, or in its least,
its implications, in the hours & days
following the final slump, God's lungs giving up,
the criminal forgiven, the criminal
not, & the squeeze of each between. Jesus seeking
what I can and will say every kid seeks
from their own
father: presence. To
not have to
say why have you
abandoned me? It
reminds me, and this is
a stretch of time and a context out of transition,
but bear with me,
to say I remember seeing,
& needing to believe in it
as a possibility, the first film I saw reeled
backwards. Its end
its beginning.
I wanted to believe I could live
backwards. Become
new. But...
And so. This little
egg
is sunk to gunk under its foil. Lowell is
imipatiently unread, spine spread,
his skunk unborn or slunk
off, or his Nantucket dead yet
living maybe. And speaking
of living backwards, I see
the fingers pinching this candy to place
and then forward: the three to five second delight
a tongue might need to light its ennui
to strike the foil of gold, God
has it been
years sitting there, tell me it has been
waiting unseen for at least
the length of time it takes to stumble
then sit in the confessional or the tomb
(they’re both the same, in some way)
ageless and out of date and say, breathless
bless me, please, bless me
