Читать книгу Grace, Fallen from - Marianne Boruch - Страница 13

Not the underwater goggles to see

great distances, not the let’s pretend

of the museum’s “Street of Yesteryear,”

its candy’s single stripes in jars, life-sized

dummy at the counter,

stiff collar and apron, eyes skewed to retrieve

his blank good will. Nor is it

book after book of the same war

over remembered time, the old nun called it,

speeded up for the test. Wars of different

colors, weaves and counterweaves,

different surgical instruments, different

agonies via different

far-off blasts, different endlessly

pointless outcomes, different

tiny viruses ingesting

the lungs first, derailing trains there,

breath starting and stopping

at each smoky depot.

I sat at a desk

where we all sat. I opened

that book of flags. Once a woman took up

a whole half page, looming there,

middle of the 19^th century, absolutely

glacial because happiness is momentary

and eternity is work, the camera

shrouded, laying

its slow black against white until her

terrible face found me.

Was that

childhood going on? That noise

in the background—half-starved, deranged bird,

half Hallelujah Chorus sung

by the whole town, bad tenors included? Ache

of cold metal on the playground,

one glove lost forever, night,

hours of it, caught

by a streetlight?

Which is simply

the past. In that book now, isn’t it?

And a child is writing

his name in the flyleaf, under two or three

other names, the book already underlined,

half-forgotten. Write clearly,

write in ink, the teacher is saying.