monday poem #91: Kelly Cherry, "Your Going Out"
Still on a Kelly Cherry kick. Still liking it.
Like any poem about loss - or, in this case, the process of losing - this one has a certain fill-in-the-blank quality for me: the details are different, the relationship is different, but the feeling that comes through those details makes me shiver in recognition.
Your Going Out
to my mother
I do not think I can bear
this: your going out,
ray by ray, being swallowed up
in shadow, until I can hardly make out
your form in the world.
Your long-distance voice
is both a reassurance and a threat,
love, and pain, an absence met-
I listen to its eager, faint, girlish, southern accent
and think: I do not think
I can bear
this: your letters, each sent,
diminishing like a chord, the fact
that you have had to give up playing
the violin, which was what you always loved best,
next to Father. I do not think I can bear that-
his need for you
having to go unanswered despite your willingness,
his desperate hoping,
hoping,
that your silence means only he is growing
deaf,
or this: knowing
that not all our love can keep you
as you have been, shining,
and comic and pure,
your fine energy
that compels us to endure.
- Kelly Cherry
from Natural Theology
Like any poem about loss - or, in this case, the process of losing - this one has a certain fill-in-the-blank quality for me: the details are different, the relationship is different, but the feeling that comes through those details makes me shiver in recognition.
Your Going Out
to my mother
I do not think I can bear
this: your going out,
ray by ray, being swallowed up
in shadow, until I can hardly make out
your form in the world.
Your long-distance voice
is both a reassurance and a threat,
love, and pain, an absence met-
I listen to its eager, faint, girlish, southern accent
and think: I do not think
I can bear
this: your letters, each sent,
diminishing like a chord, the fact
that you have had to give up playing
the violin, which was what you always loved best,
next to Father. I do not think I can bear that-
his need for you
having to go unanswered despite your willingness,
his desperate hoping,
hoping,
that your silence means only he is growing
deaf,
or this: knowing
that not all our love can keep you
as you have been, shining,
and comic and pure,
your fine energy
that compels us to endure.
- Kelly Cherry
from Natural Theology