Tag Archives: say

What Binds

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Fragility of things robust
speaks only if we know
what becomes of living
not allowed. Once called,

one will not be invited.
Old, poor we serve still
what disregards us,
lest we disturb the air

with our endurance.
Some say we choose
what binds us. Those who
cannot choose don’t say.

Fold

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There are things between them that are things
on their minds—somewhere a beach, somewhere
a frozen pond. There are things they say,
they say to themselves things they don’t say,
there where the folded things are between
them, where there are things in the folds they’ve
put out of mind, things that have their own
lives there, groceries and lovers, sleep,
work, and lots nonetheless of wondering
why what occupies them occupies,
what else there might be past the fold where
there is only knowing things unknown,
where the gods that make are wooly mad,
they say, to give to take, to tick time
so, to wake us only when it’s gone.

Stand

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This is the part where someone doesn’t stand up for someone. Or doesn’t stand up to someone. But that’s not the kind of standing up this part needs.

Maybe someone simply stands up, to go to another room, to go into the bar, to walk to a corner store, turns back as if compelled to say something that gets forgotten right there on the spot.

After he’s been gone for months, maybe for years, she’s still driving herself crazy with it: what was he going to say? She’s got this feeling there’s something she should’ve known even if he didn’t say it, or just that there was something she didn’t know, that he was going to tell her something she needed to know. Life becomes impossible, there’s something she doesn’t know that she needs to know, for what, to avoid danger, to pursue delight.

Sometimes it’s like something she’s circling, sometimes it’s like something circling her, getting tighter in, making it hard to breathe. Sometimes it’s as if she’s living there where it is whatever it is, that that is where she has her life, or where her life has gone, but she has no access to it. This life she’s in now, the one she does have access to, this life feels like an approximation of something. She’s not looking for something in this life. She’s looking for it in whatever life she might have had if he had said whatever it was he was going to say.