Apartment Poetry Quarterly

10A              10B              10C              10D              10E              10F

 

10D Cary Stough

 

EXPERIENCE1

            1 Grieve, that grief of my beautiful estate. Waldo has died, to me, perhaps, for many. Death, which in itself, at this juncture, is my certainty that it always was beautiful; that he died, and is dead. To touch upon this calamity, such as grief, which not to them as they say is subjecting. I shall come back to it, finding reality sharp. Marvelous in which rages a part of me. That one thing, the only thing grief has is words: the marvelous, the beautiful of beautiful, ethical bankruptcy. Yet this grief that falls off from me leaves. Carries me one spiral into real nature and falters. Though not in my arms that he is. And there are moods curled in the peaks and at edges of a great deal of mountains.

            A great deal and more could be said, to touch, and not is calamity. If tomorrow I should be as this beautiful, my intention was merely to mark its absurdity beneath which they try to bury it, in the death of my more, my Waldo, the son of my Lidian. That anything Lidian. Anything more. Or that anything is, and is beautiful, but from in passing a much more indigent stream. Grief, too, a detailed discussion it has… I seem to have lost my beauty tomorrow: Waldo has and has has. The one who was laid under, tearing me, does not, though is not torn away, lay frustrated. Some thing which I fancied, enlarged without enriching the I, can teach nothing more than the wind should not blow. More than the wind should not blow, nor water should burn him.

            I grieve that grief— Well, I grieve that my grief.

            That souls between us and never the things that we aim. To the old belief, standing tales, mixed with our lifetime. Soon, now more than five years of me, thence. My principal cause, my own dearestly, dearestly, a curse that was beautiful. And that all the rest, plays about surfaces, glittering. A chair. That a chair. Or a wing. That a wing. Hides in the bible, no scar. That the hide of the bible, a scar. That anything Lidian. And winter. We wake and we find there are stairs up above in the frost. The frosts of our lives are not so as threatened we should not know our place. Though of so liberal fire she sends from on high, and so understood. And the stairs, in a fit of their nature, seem to impart the lower levels thereof. Waldo has died.

            That I should touch it again. The fire. Would not even I pay the costly price of such contact?








THE DIAGRAM

One of us calls the ministry Decision, and another one of us calls it Reaction. One of us calls it Memory, and another one of us Reunion. One of us tentatively whispers “This is a dictatorship, this is a prison, these are the barracks.” One of us calls it  Delusion, and one of us less tentatively whispers, “This is a school, that was my crib, these are my wheels, that was a wheelchair.” One of us denies it’s a ministry, and another one of us calls it Recording Device, loosing the eyes. One of us even less tentatively whispers, “This is a church, these are my hearing aids,” and less tentatively, “This was a church, this is a factory, this is a library, these are my crutches, these are my glasses,” and even less tentatively, “This is a book, that is a magazine, this is my cane, this was a department store, this was my street, this was my neighborhood, that was a grocery store.” And another, “This was my prison, this was not my decision, these were my barracks, these were not my decision.” Yet finally another, “This was the gas station I worked at, the people I passed, the bar I often frequented, and there, being led out of the bar single file, were my friends, those were my hope, my drinking companions, my fellow pensioners, guardians of the covered-up hall, lien-holders, lovers with whom I conspired…”