What we did and would and could
What we should
What we did not and why
Which we couldn't
What she said What I said
What we did
How some words flick open, slip sharpened steel beneath the breastbone
How others encyst themselves and grow tumorous, stopping up the lungs
How what was fluid became solid
How the sea was covered in ice and the rain needled down, encasing the cars in brittleness
How a gesture incompleted never--
How stillness shattered
How the leg of a chair flung down
bounces but does not break
Notes
Images are of the West River in Sheet Harbour today as it roars between freeze and melt; the poem, a rough sort of sonnet, inspired by one of several exercises my students did several weeks ago, to "write out an argument." Here I was reaching for something that might, as a horoscope said a few weeks ago, "bless the messiness and largeness of desire." Love is never without its hard edges; what matters is that we survive (literally) our madness.
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