Poetry from NER 42.3 (2021)
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The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.
—John Berger, from Ways of Seeing
Grief paralyzes. Motion continues; time departs.
Something’s left with no means to retrieve it.
A candle out in the down–clap of darkness. Then to wade and wade—
In grief: I, detached from place and time.
—
You appear in candlelight across the table.
The oysters gleam in butter. I ask for your hand.
Our fingers hold together for the first time.
—
If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen.
—
In a voicemail, you’re walking downhill
to your house, a detail I now know about.
Static crinkles out your breath
to see if I want to talk.
—
I worry that your dream was right.
That I was the abuser, not you. How do I know?
—
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
—
There’s a way, in your dream,
that you’re able to love me.
The you I love inside the dream
who asks how we can remember.
I want your dream to be right.
—
Now somewhere else, when I read your words,
I get back into the habit of undoing my own.
—
I said yes to your dream so many times
I saw myself as you dreamed me.
—
If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.
—
How do I know?
I don’t.
—
Once you leave someone, the dream becomes divided.
Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.
—
Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent.
—
The divided field is a field that cannot be seen
through the eyes of one person. That is,
a field with space for your absence.
—
In my dreams, you remain as vivid as ever,
but you no longer have control over me.
—
A dream is in and out of focus; it is both to aspire
and to touch in spirit—reverie. It is the act of giving
away control of consciousness, to see and be seen
but out of focus. A dream is, in both cases, a vision.
The dream reminds me: what I see and what I know
is never settled. The dream is, also, neither the future
nor the past but a perception of the world through me,
both voluntary and not.
But to hear correctly is my concern. I have no other.
So what is written follows, gets lost, finds the path
again—and what is seen there: that is all included.
NOTES: Italicized quotes are from Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The quote in the last section is from an essay by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Angela Livingstone.