So now it has our complete attention, and we are made whole. We take it into our hands like a rope, grateful and tethered, freed from wanting for it to happen. It is here, precisely as we imagined.
If the man has died, if the child’s illness has taken a sudden turn, if the house has burned in the middle of night and in winter, there is at least a kind of stopping that will pass for peace.
Now when we speak it is with a great seriousness, and when we touch it is with our own fingers, and when we listen it is with our big eyes that have looked at a thing and have not blinked.
There is no longer any reason to distrust us. When it leaves it will leave like summer, and we will remember it as a break in something that had seemed as unrelenting as coming rain and we will be sorry to see it go.
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown? Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her, Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry— you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.
And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says, hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.
[text ID: Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them. / Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby. / Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory.]
We want the spring to come and the winter / to pass. We want / whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and / then more of it. - Marie Howe
