Someone asks a question and suddenly there is a click from the lock. The utterance of a name is an invisible hand that turns the knob, that opens the shut door.
The memories come rolling out and the intrusion of remembering, so painstakingly thwarted many sunsets ago, resumes where it had been left off.
We end up finding ourselves in the last place we want to be: inside a dark, erstwhile forgotten room, counting could-have-beens.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Saturday, June 1, 2013
The question of tenderness
How I would like to believe in tenderness-
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way.
-Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"
Another series of points, revolving around the word "tenderness":
the end of an exhausting week, the body collapsing into vague relief; limbs weakening to softness; the mind yearning for rest; that conversation on poetry with my daughter, exchanging notes on Christina Rossetti's "Remember" and agreeing on the sadness in its lines; next, a flashback of my sunlit childhood, glimpses of orange twilights, a song; that word, tenderness, this line, "because there, too, is tenderness" limning my thoughts like some sad loveliness; pages on a page, Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree", that line, "How I would like to believe in tenderness--".
The question of love breaks, certain, under its own weight. Remembrance, instrospection--they come in, swift and incorrigible. The night falls, wistful, its softness more pronounced. Solitude, daughters, childhood, the promise of sleep. Where there is poetry, where there is tenderness, the heart succumbs.
Where--
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way.
-Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"
Another series of points, revolving around the word "tenderness":
the end of an exhausting week, the body collapsing into vague relief; limbs weakening to softness; the mind yearning for rest; that conversation on poetry with my daughter, exchanging notes on Christina Rossetti's "Remember" and agreeing on the sadness in its lines; next, a flashback of my sunlit childhood, glimpses of orange twilights, a song; that word, tenderness, this line, "because there, too, is tenderness" limning my thoughts like some sad loveliness; pages on a page, Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree", that line, "How I would like to believe in tenderness--".
The question of love breaks, certain, under its own weight. Remembrance, instrospection--they come in, swift and incorrigible. The night falls, wistful, its softness more pronounced. Solitude, daughters, childhood, the promise of sleep. Where there is poetry, where there is tenderness, the heart succumbs.
Where--
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