monday poem #283: Angie Estes, "Revision"
Enchantée won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts poetry award: $100,000 (no, that's not a typo) awarded to a mid-career poet.
Revision
When the pasta is badly broken, we eat
maltagliati, and once we think
the risotto is done, we must still
make it creamy, mantecare. Because it was
never finished, Proust kept writing
in the margins of his drafts, and when
they were full, pasted small pieces of paper,
paperoles unfurling from the page as if
it had wings, could be released on parole
with a promise of words. The past, he claimed,
is hidden in some material object of which
we have no inkling, just as scientists maintain
that because a memory is altered each time
it's recalled, the original memory is the one
we can't know. In Michelangelo's crosshatching
and chiseling, the two-dimensional slowly
becomes three by the same math used
in the sentence The royal We lives
in Synecdoche, New York. But since when
is a sentence ever innocent? Phoebes
still wag from the wires like words we meant
to say, and Michelangelo's Prisoners
remain locked in stone because
we can’t remember that they were
ever free. But if we have to misremember
in order to recall, what must we do
to forget? At the end of June, cabbage leaves begin
curving in toward one another. Soon they will
bury their head in their many hands.
- Angie Estes
from Enchantée
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
Revision
When the pasta is badly broken, we eat
maltagliati, and once we think
the risotto is done, we must still
make it creamy, mantecare. Because it was
never finished, Proust kept writing
in the margins of his drafts, and when
they were full, pasted small pieces of paper,
paperoles unfurling from the page as if
it had wings, could be released on parole
with a promise of words. The past, he claimed,
is hidden in some material object of which
we have no inkling, just as scientists maintain
that because a memory is altered each time
it's recalled, the original memory is the one
we can't know. In Michelangelo's crosshatching
and chiseling, the two-dimensional slowly
becomes three by the same math used
in the sentence The royal We lives
in Synecdoche, New York. But since when
is a sentence ever innocent? Phoebes
still wag from the wires like words we meant
to say, and Michelangelo's Prisoners
remain locked in stone because
we can’t remember that they were
ever free. But if we have to misremember
in order to recall, what must we do
to forget? At the end of June, cabbage leaves begin
curving in toward one another. Soon they will
bury their head in their many hands.
- Angie Estes
from Enchantée
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth