Friday? Night? Close Enough

But couldn’t it all have been

a little nicer,

as my mother’d say. Did it

have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?

I know this body is impatient.

I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.

Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.

I want no more than home.

—Robert Creeley, from “Goodbye”

I cannot ask, cannot say, cannot bring myself to you, to this, to the world. I am not strong. I cannot find the lamp switch, cannot carry the light, cannot move it into all the dark places where it is needed. I cannot keep scattering bread crumbs.

I cannot formulate questions; the words get all tangled up in my head, the important and necessary punctuation mark appears in all the wrong places. It keeps asserting itself –inserting itself– too early and often, impatient, whether in an attempt to keep it vague or simple I can’t say: What? Why? How? Yes? No?

I have no control over the weather. It does whatever it wants to, entirely against my will. I have never been able to find this arrangement acceptable.

I do not eat, do not allow myself to desire, refuse to acknowledge need. I hear, whether I like it or not, bongo drums, insistent, relentless. I hear the rising and falling of jets, a ceaseless torment, the sound of some freedom I don’t have.

I wish this world trafficked in simple explanations, a foolish and naive wish if ever there was one.

I heard a man say, “I fell into this racket a long time ago and I’ve been falling ever since,” a comment that has returned to me again and again over the last several days.

My hands have become useless, can no longer reach, or have nothing in reach they wish to reach. My hands are done wishing.

I do not know what I have become.

“They’re bad and they’re good,” said Pod. “They’re honest and they’re artful –it’s just as it takes them at the moment. And animals, if they could talk, would say the same. Steer clear of them –that’s what I’ve always been told. No matter what they promise you. No good never really came to no one from any human bean.”

–Mary Norton, The Borrowers