Small Sorceries Enlarged by Loss
“The difference between Despair
And Fear—is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck—
And when the Wreck has been—”
“The muse and angel come from outside us: the angel gives lights, and the muse gives forms (Hesiod learned from her). Loaf of gold or tunic fold: the poet receives norms in his grove of laurel. But one must awaken the duende [ghost, goblin, demon, devil] in the remotest mansions of the blood.”
G rief is an art
composed of reappraisals, a
moment, a place, where
strangeness prevails and strangers
convene, whose escape absence
conveys, a pain made
greater by layered interrogations
laid on faces incapable
of facing loss, a
very long moment assaulting
a clock, its cost
at once a getting
away and getting off
with, a getting on
and getting by, what
no longer is and
perhaps never was, its
worth determined only by
turning over again and
again what incidents memory
insists on obliviating through
repetitions, neither accidental nor
a coincidence, rather intentional,
each instance of which
is an exercise not
so much in revisionism
but an expression of
resistance to definition’s imposition,
transgression’s imperative is to
find in its lessening
the tension’s lesson, accepting
liquid gold falls the
same way flame folds,
encloses in curdled borders
traced in milk every
pouting mouth’s tragical history
tour pored out, this
informs what no one
shouts, diverts, re-routes, what
loss works but never sweats.
