QCE52B NIE Lit 2018

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When my father dies and comes back as a dog, I already know what his favorite sound will be: the soft, almost inaudible gasp as the rubber lips of the refrigerator door unstick, followed by that arctic exhalation of cold air; then the cracking of the ice-cube tray above the sink and the quiet ching the cubes make when dropped into a glass. Unable to pronounce the name of his favorite drink, or to express his preference for single malt, he will utter one sharp bark and point the wet black arrow of his nose imperatively up at the bottle on the shelf, then seat himself before me, trembling, expectant, water pouring down the long pink dangle of his tongue as the memory of pleasure from his former life shakes him like a tail. What I’ll remember as I tower over him, holding a dripping, whiskey-flavored cube above his open mouth, relishing the power rushing through my veins the way it rushed through his, what I’ll remember as I stand there is the hundred clever ...

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is starry and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer. My heart looks for ...

You ask for a poem.  I offer you a blade of grass.  You say it is not good enough.  You ask for a poem.  I say this blade of grass will do.  It has dressed itself in frost,  It is more immediate  Than any image of my making.  You say it is not a poem,  It is a blade of grass and grass  Is not quite good enough.  I offer you a blade of grass.  You are indignant.  You say it is too easy to offer grass.  It is absurd.  Anyone can offer a blade of grass.  You ask for a poem.  And so I write you a tragedy about  How a blade of grass  Becomes more and more difficult to offer,  And about how as you grow older  A blade of grass  Becomes more difficult to accept.

After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises and you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes ahead with the grace of woman, not the grief of a child and you learn to build all your roads on today because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure you really are strong you really do have worth and you learn and you learn with every goodbye, you learn…

You are the bread and the knife, The crystal goblet and the wine... -Jacques Crickillon You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. And you are certainly not the pine-scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening ...

October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen I study my father's embarrassed young man's face. Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string of spiny yellow perch, in the other a bottle of Carlsbad Beer. In jeans and denim shirt, he leans against the front fender of a 1934 Ford. He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity, Wear his old hat cocked over his ear. All his life my father wanted to be bold. But the eyes give him away, and the hands that limply offer the string of dead perch and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, and don't even know the places to fish?

In an effort to get people to look  into each other’s eyes more,  and also to appease the mutes,  the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred  and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words,  so I slowly whisper I love you  thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line  and listen to each other breathe.

I want you and you are not here. I pause in this garden, breathing the colour thought is   before language into still air. Even your name is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer   than the words I have you say you said before. Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me   with a look, standing here whilst cool late light   dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,   but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,   inventing love, until the calls of nightjars interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,   into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day – A sunny day with leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play  Your first game of football, then, like a satellite  Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away Behind a scatter of boys. I can see You walking away from me towards the school  With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free  Into a wilderness, the gait of one Who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure, eddying away Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem, Has something I never quite grasp to convey About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching  Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay. I have had worse partings, but none that so  Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly  Saying what God alone could perfectly show –  How selfhood begins with a walking away,  And love is proved in the letting go. ...

Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall.

Between my finger and my thumb    The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound    When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:    My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds    Bends low, comes up twenty years away    Stooping in rhythm through potato drills    Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft    Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade.    Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right aw...

It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath gently blanching the windows. So I opened one, then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow. He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig. Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky, but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked a pear from a branch. – we grew Fondante d’Automne – and it sat in his palm, like a lightbulb. On. I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree? He came into the house. The doorknobs gleamed. He drew the blinds. You know the mind; I thought of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and of Miss Macready. He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne. The look on his face was strange, wild, vain. I said, What in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh. I served up the...

Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief. I am trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or a kissogram. I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are. Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring, if you like. Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife.

(He's a drifter, always floating around her, has nowhere else to go. He wishes she would sing, not much, just the scales; or take some notice, give him the fish eye.) (Bounded by round walls she makes fish eyes and kissy lips at him, darts behind pebbles, swallows his charms hook, line and sinker) (He's bowled over. He would take her to the ocean, they could count the waves. There, in the submarine silence, they would share their deepest secrets. Dive for pearls like stars.) (But her love's since gone belly-up. His heart sinks like a fish. He drinks like a stone. Drowns those sorrows, stares emptily through glass.) (the reason, she said she wanted) (and he could not give) a life beyond the (bowl) QLRS Vol. 2 No. 2 Jan 2003

Even from the beach I could sense it--- lack of welcome, lack of abiding life, like something in the air, a certain lack of sound.  Yesterday there was a mountain out there. Now it's gone.  And look at this radio, each tube neatly sliced in half.  Blow the place up! That was my advice. But after the storm and the earthquake, after the tactic of the exploding plane and the strategy of the sinking boat, it looked like fate and I wanted to say, "Don't you see? So what if you're a famous biochemist! Lost with all hands is an old story." Sure, we're on the edge of an important breakthrough, everyone hearing voices, everyone falling into caves, and you're out wandering through the jungle in the middle of the night in your negligée. Yes, we're way out there on the edge of science, while the rest of the island continues to disappear until nothing's left except this cliff in the middle of the ocean, and you, in your bathing sui...