poem of the day
How I Envy You, Natasha Trethewey
I want to write about the exact moment when my father sat us down and broke the news that it was over.
Pacman wasn’t working fast enough, he said, and the ghosts had won.
I’d describe our living room, the three leather couches, still stiff with newness, and the jig saw puzzle, that lay, splendidly incomplete, on a three-legged table that could barely take its weight. I would draw some sort of gentle parallel between that puzzle, still ripe with frustrated potentialities, and my father’s life. If I happened to be in the mood, I would juxtapose his well-worn parting sentiments with a discordant image or two, like the way my sister’s elbow keeps digging into my hip, or how the ticking of the kitchen clock reminds me of some long forgotten camp tune.
Perhaps I’d even throw in a bit of wry commentary on the obsurdity of three-legged tables, just for the hell of it.
Such a moment never was.
My father’s dying had no beginning and no end.
We lived an asymptotic grief.
Because he refused to admit the thing that must be admitted, he was an inadvertent destroyer of meaning.
Poems hang on the vine, like premature berries.
Bitter and half-formed, they fall to the ground, only to find themselves in a world peopled by creatures who had never heard of vines, or berries.
I want to write about the exact moment when my father sat us down and broke the news that it was over.
Pacman wasn’t working fast enough, he said, and the ghosts had won.
I’d describe our living room, the three leather couches, still stiff with newness, and the jig saw puzzle, that lay, splendidly incomplete, on a three-legged table that could barely take its weight. I would draw some sort of gentle parallel between that puzzle, still ripe with frustrated potentialities, and my father’s life. If I happened to be in the mood, I would juxtapose his well-worn parting sentiments with a discordant image or two, like the way my sister’s elbow keeps digging into my hip, or how the ticking of the kitchen clock reminds me of some long forgotten camp tune.
Perhaps I’d even throw in a bit of wry commentary on the obsurdity of three-legged tables, just for the hell of it.
Such a moment never was.
My father’s dying had no beginning and no end.
We lived an asymptotic grief.
Because he refused to admit the thing that must be admitted, he was an inadvertent destroyer of meaning.
Poems hang on the vine, like premature berries.
Bitter and half-formed, they fall to the ground, only to find themselves in a world peopled by creatures who had never heard of vines, or berries.