Immanence and Experience; The Irony of Writing What Cannot Be Said

"Now worry about how this emerges from mouths

and pages.  Fret on the exact order and precision.

There is still blood, bones and ash on the

move.  Restless and subterranean vowels,

eye contact, what isn’t said and the position

of the speaker

behind the curtain—these

spin the coin of our children-- round

sweet faces--

on a distant table.

If we stutter or drift, something terrifying

settles upon the sentence:  poetry perhaps,

demanding doubt, confusion, an apprehension

of meaning that refuses to be spoken."

(me in "The Grammar of Panic" from Working in the Emptiness)

"Every ancester sleeps in our moving bodies,
mine, yours, all of us descendants...
...bulbs,
laid them gently into their cold grave socks, singing
hyacinth, tulip, narcissus, crocus.  They're dumb
as bits of coal
and descending inward. Descendant. This trap door

we drop down every day, waking, say,
to no apparent history
but a simple room: edge of windown, a shirt
flung over a high-backed chair, the absent, usual coming
of winter light." (Marianne Boruch, "Thanksgiving" in Descendant)