- Song of Some Ruins, and: Choose, and: Love, That Hugeness
Song of Some Ruins
It’s no use walking the beasts of my longing without you, compañero, you whose name means stone the sun
moves across. Remember our house, and the statuary of clouds drifting through the rooms? And the sheets and blankets of our habits,
and ourselves two hounds lying down. We loved like we fought, slugging our way toward each other, sending up flares to announce our advance. And when our city
burned, we stood in the ashes, and admired each other’s bodies. Now I ask you: how will we manage
without the steadiness of our long unhappiness? Can you say you don’t miss our furious
putting up with each other? The silver waves go on polishing themselves. The sun goes down alone. Tell me: is this as it should be? My body
goes on without you burnishing its crevices. Without your faults, there is no salt. I will not again be fat. Even my hair will abandon me, like a woman walking away
until you can’t see her. So what if I’m given other dawns? I ache for the grandeur of uproar. Light
brings on its armadas of taxis and butterflies, and I’m forced to go into the street
and talk to agreeable strangers. [End Page 93]
Choose
The expected one and the unexpected The erect one and the one bent over
The one who says I’m talking too much and keeps talking The one too shy to meet your eyes
The fascinating one, and the not very, the one you’re maneuvering to avoid
and the one you turned away who comes again who again you turn away
This one that one the slender the fat one The one who is stream and the one who is stone
The wet one the dry one the low and the high one soaring over granite, its scatter of bone
The one just out of prison, the one just sentenced and the prison warden
The one who killed, and then ate the heart of each dead and the one who escaped alive
and you, as though standing before yourself, longing to be taken in—
know that whoever approaches is the one you’ve been looking for all these years
Know you are given many chances, as many as the seconds, the stars [End Page 94]
Love, That Hugeness
Love snuggles us, and then Tagore warns: go on your knees, the All-Destroying
has come—and will hang around a while, then mosey on. A girl’s sob
and a cup of cream. A cup of cream and a gun. Things seem peachy keen,
then the peaches turn, and Marion Fisher, new breasts and a crush on a boy, stands
against the wall in the Amish schoolroom watching Charlie Rogers tie her wrists,
her ankles. Charlie, who rose in the dark, kissed his sleeping daughter’s cheek
and went off to sing the familiar hymn of delivering the morning’s cream. Stones
and bread, Simone Weil said, both comefrom Christ. And here come the shining
moments, yes, no, each moment we choose, and Marion too, at one time or another,
hurt the blooming world. It happens, we say, as though we didn’t have a choice.
I didn’t mean to, I told my mother. Yes, she said, but you did it. Each moment [End Page 95]
we choose, each moment we may change, here comes the next moment, don’t hurry,
there’s time—Charlie may say Wait, I don’tknow what got into me, I want to be bread.
Instead Marion rose like cream spilling over, stood in that high place and put on shining
garments. Shoot me, she said, and let the othersgo. See them in that moment: they are like me,
like us. Love them both, and yourself. Both are stones. Both are bread.
Marilyn Krysl’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her fourth story collection, Dinner with Osama, won the Richard Sullivan Prize in 2008.