“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"Changing Room"
The breath's slow
drum-brush marks the end of Gillian's time.
Her hair's haphazard marathon, swaying
with the slowest jazz of afternoon. Detectives
wandering at her breast; the nipple's darker trilby.
A black thief hair, returning to its crime.
*
Now, amongst the sheets, there is
a trace of blacker hair, curled and blunt
as shorthand. I watch her move, the blankets
fanned across the mattress like a deal of cards.
Her foot beside an ashtray shell, its butted
cigarettes settled into parquetry. She dresses
as a child might in a changing room, all
half-under things. And what she'll do tonight
comes out of silence like a talking in her sleep.
She's leaving; and the similes are gone.
A borrowed room, and everything quite suddenly
and only like itself: this coat, this coat.
This floor, this floor.
— John A. Scott, Singles
Letter
Today I did almost nothing.
Read a little, tried to write a sentence
to make another sentence seem necessary.
I wasn't unhappy. Everything
I could will myself to do I'd done,
so I said I'd done enough.
Now I'm looking out my window:
white pine, ash, a single birch,
the leanings and crossings
of branches. And then the sky:
pale, undecided. Years ago
you wrote to me about a matter
that worried you, and you said
at the end, "That's probably the best,
and most true, way to think about it."
I kept your sentence in my notebook.
I liked its shape. I admired the way,
young as you were, you could feel
one kind of thinking
adjusting into another, one truth
becoming a better truth.
Now you're far off, and alone, and I
have no advice you haven't already
given yourself. What can I tell you?
That I'm here? That today, when I saw
how tenderly the light was moving
among those trees, I thought of you?
— Lawrence Raab