Laura Quinney
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Bedeviled
The dishwasher has broken
and flooded the kitchen floor.
Already twenty years
with children have
flashed away like a hummingbird.
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Approach
In the distance
the road dwindles
and little by little
the houses the cars
the lawns the signs
and the curb too
fall away and then
the road is dirt
and even the trees
give out and there is
just some stubble
and bald earth beside
the road contracting
into the horizon
near nothingness.
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A Tale of Two Tales
In Cinderella
at the touch of the fairy
godmother’s wand
ordinary things spring up
into bedazzling forms
for a night:
the ragged shift
becomes a white ballgown
The fat pumpkin
is a rounded coach
the clogs are now
glass slippers.
In our life it is
the other way around
it is the splendor
we start with and when
the spell of inexperience
gives way
we see we have lived
the poor girl’s measure
our thrilling oracles
sunk in their homely kinds.
Unspoken Words
What did I think?
That after this life
would come another
just like it
and leisure to say
what I did not say here?
I thought there was
time after the time
passed and words
after the words meant.
When I was alone
with the unheard
it fell away
and it took
into its chasm
what had been
along with what had not.
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The Breath of Others
Out of the murk of so much
temporal detritus, voices
speak words sharp in my memory,
on indifferent subjects.
They come swimming up to me,
those ephemeral words
that were like a touch,
good as any love.
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End of Lockdown
My tsundoku*
is still as tall
as I am.
Assignments.
But those were not
the books
I actually read.
End of the pause,
end of the long
breath
between
the rounds
of customary life.
Now the brood
will scatter,
they go where
they were
meant to have been.
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You, take up your satchel
and your staff.
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*tsundoku: the pile of books by your bed you intend to read
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Laura Quinney is Professor of English at Brandeis University where she teaches Romanticism, poetry and poetics, and philosophical approaches to literature. She's author of Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth, The Poetics of Disappointment, and William Blake on Self and Soul, as well as two books of poetry, Corridor and New Ghosts. She is currently writing a book on the subject of "self-haunting."