You have dared call Time your “brother,” take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow.
- Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (translated by Richard Howard)
I don’t know who reads this. I don’t know who reads anything I write anymore, or whether that matters. I’m not sure it should… but writing, to me, has always involved this effort to transcend loneliness, however brief. A poem and a painting then, since poems and paintings are less canny than human beings. Poems and paintings cannot — and therefore do not— look down on you. Nor are they careerists. They have no ambition to queen or king themselves. However much the poet or painter who created the poem or painting may be a late capitalist careerist, the poem and the painting are free to repudiate their creators. In this sense, the poem and the painting will always be better than— and the best of — us.
Marriage Among Friends
after Lowell, for his student
In my doubts I move about the morning like a widow
looking into mirrors at my softening chin and arms
for reassurance, then shuffle to the coffee on the table
(the pile of books are just as fixed as dust and furniture),
then sit, then rise and start again, peering, letting hours go.
Yellow, all yellow, christ. And then your voice wanting approval
on the phone. Then I am again the dismissed lover, lifting
periodicals like slate to shape a summer mantel,
hefting each, looking along the gloss for what defense
might reside in unblinking faces: good looks, that's really all.
The air along the coast shoves its tongue into the throat
and fights along the spine of waves blown back, the spume
collapsing back with a false sigh, like dismay, outside my window.
Left to go on as before, I move like a camera through the room:
a moon, a dialogue worn out like woolen winter coats.
“When marriage is surmounted, what is left?” you offered.
My hands stumble to the brink of things but can't grasp
how that simple question made you hurry from the house,
and become the accidental woman, dividing herself into loaves
to feed the guests. The mute woman who is never chosen twice.
Frank Stewart
