Hello, suddenly summer.
I sneakily found a way to secretly spend the entire afternoon in the sunlight – one third in a coffee shop filled with keys, one third in a book store filled with light, and the last third on a bench outside an ice cream parlor filled with vinyl records.
Curiously, I talked to three different men all sharing the same name at each place.
There’s a pattern here. And it matters.
I went underground, appropriately, as I read about Persephone.
I saw a ghost of my past sitting in one of the seats.
Then, what was left of me that hadn’t already melted from sunlight and history promptly fell to pieces as I read the rest of it on the way from Bergen Street to Court Square.
Dean Young said once that poetry is an art of beginnings and endings. If you want middles, read a novel.
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A note before you attempt to read this:
If you are going to attempt it. I confess that reading poetry is REALLY hard for me, too. I don’t often have the patience to read more than a fraction of a poem. I *almost* wanted to post the last line of this excerpt, but that would ruin everything. We shouldn’t reveal the endings of things before it is appropriate, should we? Try treating this one like meditation. Go very slow. Allow yourself to pause when you want to. But read it the whole way through. I usually only post small stanzas or quotes because they are the most relevant, and I thought about including a “tl;dr” for this one, but this entire excerpt is relevant.
Ahem.
The relevance of the entire body that is only a part of a whole.
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As excerpted in the New York Times: Louise Glück’s ‘Averno‘
FIRST CHAPTER
‘Averno’
