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Beginning Again
- The Kent State University Press
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a different life 305 Beginning Again Lise Menn I. You will permit me, at times, To remember my dead husband, And I will permit you to consider Your fleeting wives. We will construct a new space For our minds to live Stronger, at least in places, Because of what we have learned. So I think we do well to remember Who is buried beneath the threshold, For better or worse. II. Six good-sized shelves of poetry—ten boxes at least Of books I hadn’t yet got to reading Went off in a truck to California. I tried to make a list, Thinking maybe I would catch up, one by one, Taking them out of the library. Now you have come into my life With more poems than I will ever be able to read. Something balances here, Or not… III. Beginning again is like: Putting on a back pack. Taking a back pack off. 306 the widows’ handbook Kissing again is like: Finding something thought totally lost. Finding something that never existed before, Except it was there all along. Fucking again is like discovering a new country Whose neighbors’ customs and geography you think you might have studied. Beginning again is like understanding That I am not dead And neither are you. IV. I can feel the hard places, the scarred places, the ice floes, Can try to poke carefully between them, looking for softness; Can issue maps, guidebooks, and bulletins With self-guided tours Of my own fault lines. Holding your hand before sleeping, I find the word and the name I was wanting: Companion. Each equal, each elder, each novice, by turns Or all at once all of them, We can keep company, My dear, my companion. V. Loving again is startling. I sputter for words like a hosed Cherubino But I know what it is, und darüber muss ich schweigen In thanks deeper and dumber than numb hands reaching toward a campfire, Feeling and remembering What it is to be warm. [44.211.116.163] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:55 GMT) a different life 307 Author’s Notes . “...a hosed Cherubino / But I know what it is”: Voi, che sapete (You who know): Cherubino ’s passionately confused canzone from the opera Le nozze di Figaro. Text by Lorenzo da Ponte (79–88), music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (756–79). Voi, che sapete che cosa e amor, You, who know what love is donne, vedete s’io l’ho nel cor! ladies, see if I have it in my heart! In traditional period costuming, Cherubino wears short trunks and hose; pun intended. . “…und darüber muss ich schweigen,” after Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 7: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen. “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.” The Ogden translation renders it: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” ...