The sky in its ultramarine hour frames that tremendous, impossible moment when the stores close. The seamstresses turn to other seams.
It hurts, that stink of workers who embroidered flowers to dress bodies flawless and flawed. Impossible, the light of that preterit world in tulle and cotton.
A room stuffed with the promise of dances. My nieces, with no father to see them leave the house like that, dazzling, orphan.
Sun outside the store, powerless to penetrate that room. That hulking lack, and living with it. Canvas and paper. What I write today along the edge of the unsaid.
(Posibilidad)
El cielo en su hora ultramarina enmarca el tremendo, imposible minuto de cerrar los comercios. Las costureras vuelven a otras costuras.
Duele el olor de quienes pensaron flores bordadas que vestirían cuerpos perfectos e imperfectos. Imposible la luz del mundo pretérito en tul y algodón.
Atiborrado un cuarto con la promesa de los bailes. Mis sobrinas sin padre que las vea salir de la casa así, deslumbrantes, huérfanas.
El sol afuera del comercio, sin poder penetrar ese cuarto. El gran ausente y la vida con él. Tela y papel. Lo que hoy escribo a un costado de lo no dicho.
This poem is part of a series entitled “Postscript,” written in response to photographs by Barry Shapiro. The poems in this series are dedicated to Pedro Pons Caso (1961-2018).
"Adam Zagajewski was the kind of person who would offer to drop you off at your hotel after a poetry reading only to pull over midway to better focus on a conversation about poetry. He would email the next day to recommend some more poets he loved, without any of that Bloomian anxiety of influence."
"The bus ride in the poem seems timeless in the way of an allegory or a parable, partly because travel is a metaphor we all recognize but also because the poem uses a perspective that is intermittently omniscient. The long opening sentence describes the bus from the outside as it travels toward the setting sun with its 'windshield flashing pink'—not as the passengers inside, or the lone traveler waiting some miles away, could have seen it."
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