Curtains
I want the real reason
why the white lace folds
next to the common room window
to slice an angle of the sky
in a way that makes me ache to look
not around the crying
fabric, but through.
I want the real reason
why the drapes curl at the corners
of our soft love-
seat with falling patterns
of chandeliers, translucent
roses, stitched
one after another
to rest, finally, in my irises
in the morning
or evening light.
I want the real reason
why the sun creeps through
all these holes
woven precisely as if
to resist all origin of mottled
skin, cracked hands, bleeding
fingernails pinched,
ravaged and stabbed
in the time it takes
to forget a gesture.
I want the real reason
why it takes a mere cut to create
but a callous to reimagine stars
out of white lace; threads of flowers
fold a memory of your face pulled
here into mine. Don’t you see, Lover,
what I see? It’s more than just
this or that machine. Don’t you see
how I look for you in the world
and find only these threads
entwining my memory, and the scar
you left here in the shape
of abundance?
.
The Well-Being
– for Natalia Ginzburg
Like the Cuban-Italian writer, Alba de Céspedes y Bertini,
I’m writing to you about something you wrote in 1944
in a magazine that no longer exists. It was an essay
about being in the well, as you put it, and like you,
like de Céspedes, I, too, have been in the well.
Sometimes I see what this means in the day,
in the way my body jangles like a jack-in-the-box,
or in a car left coughing black smoke on the wrong side
of a quiet highway.
It’s no good, of course, to try and write something
out of nothing, but when I read about your wells
and how we are always falling into them, I felt like a loon
ducking my head underwater to catch a fish –
I haven’t felt like a loon in twenty years.
It happened for the first time when I was nine. It was a dream.
I fell into the dream and into the well, so smooth
and deceptively infinite. I wondered if it was one of those dreams
but when I hit the bottom the earth stabbed me in the back
and I kept on living. Now I carry this dream
with me like dirty Kleenex buried bottom-deep
in a barbarically expensive handbag, and since then,
I’ve never stopped falling into wells.
When I see a Ford F250 riding me in the rear-view mirror, I’m in a well.
When I find the human papillomavirus on the bottom of my foot, I’m in a well.
When I think I might try and look like Kendall Jenner –
when I have my Great Aunt Helen’s nose, I’m in a well.
When I stare at a blank page, I’m in a well.
When I grin because I’m good at grinning, I’m in a well.
When I love because I love, I’m in a well.
Well, well, well, what the hell are all these wells about?
And how did you know? We’ve never met
outside your sloping sentences and mine, drooping
somewhere between our pens and the shape of light
we call the moon.
But ecstatic sentences can cross boundaries
like flowers arranged at a graveside,
and you’ve given me yours, so let me say this:
I cannot thank you enough. I cannot thank you
enough because I’ve never known the earth
could stab you in the back and you could get up and go
and it would be okay. If you put too much salt
in your sourdough, or if your hip flexor strains, or if your makeup
looks clownish, or if your hands shake in a classroom,
or if you fall in love, or if you can’t write
one goddamn sentence for days,
it’s okay.
And not because you and I looked out into the light
through that cyclopic opening at what was given
to us from this great beast, this Well-Being,
but because you and I looked out and we saw something,
and we wrote it down.
.
Sara Krahn is a writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is currently a sessional lecturer and a student in the MFA in Writing program at the University of Saskatchewan. Sara’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Quagmire, The Basilisk Tree, Fieldstone Review, 34thParallel, and elsewhere.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 