Do you know
what forgiveness means? It means
the world has sinned, the world
must be pardoned
– Louise Glück
Not for our griefs and delusions
nor the punctual delivery of what we saw
each morning as bright ruses of sunlight –
if I am to ask for pardon it should be for wanting
that kind of evenness in the world, its dimensions
made plain, the only complexity residing in unkempt
vegetation and the improbable plots of foreign novels.
I should have known better. But it was common
enough to want what everybody else said they
wanted: I desired a life I could nail to the wall
like a tapestry, and having done that, get on
with the business of brushing one’s teeth,
folding up the bedclothes, all the rest that
neatly follows after. What they said I didn’t
need to do was listen – especially not to what
I mistook for a chorus of siren voices in the hedge,
retreating in waves over the tin-roof houses.
When I came closer I realized it was my own
heart fluttering against my ribs; if it was a song
so insistent, why did I turn from its longings? Much
later, I learned to negotiate my way through the inky
waters that slapped perennially against my writing-
desk without thought for the hour, or the fact that lunch
would become a pan crowned with flames on the stove.
You lifted my skirt and pressed me against the edge
of the dining table, saying do not pretend you don’t know
what I want. Even then I confess that I refused
to listen to the language in which you took
me. I confess that I wanted to mistake this
for love. Since then I have learned how appetite
can disguise itself as honesty. I cannot think
of these fragments now without remembering
your blue fingerprints on my arms, the shape
of dented furniture. Now I understand why anger,
which on occasion is the other side of grief,
would be easy to choose –
for no other color gives itself the appearance of a bruise
so quickly. It is our habit to leave marks on surfaces:
an ecriture of the body, the script of a kind of possession.
You would like a litany of disgrace, something
to incriminate me so we can be each
other’s wound and thus
be bound forever.
But I will tell you what I really want: only
this hedge, this quilt of watery light, the sheer
uncertainty of joy of whatever lies ahead –
and most of all release from this
suffering, knowing it is possible
we have loved it too much, fed to it
even the selves we wished to be
and can still become –
The Treachery of Words 