"He talked about the spirit being triumphant in the body's fall, and how we must learn to recognize the absence of the body and praise the presence of what is left behind."
(Colum McCann, Let The Great World Spin, 144-5)
An ease more akin to shared expectation than experience,
but deeper than both: somehow more honest because mostly unspoken.
The things that require the most assumption:
gift-books, recommendations, condolences,
somehow come easier & settle well.
And there are those you'll never know
more than to read the stories they send,
but something in the way they send the words,
more than a matter of selection & syntax
suggests that they too know what you've seen,
memorized, forgotten, re-collected.
What you've hidden away, they lay bare,
and the feeling goes beyond expectation,
like looking in a mirror and actually seeing yourself
and not a vaguely unfamiliar reflection.
That's why you told me about the book, isn't it?
And that is certainly why I gave it away as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment