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The Terrible Permanence of Objects, and: The Origin of Longing, and: How the Mind Works
- Prairie Schooner
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 80, Number 2, Summer 2006
- pp. 93-95
- 10.1353/psg.2006.0110
- Article
- Additional Information
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Prairie Schooner 80.2 (2006) 93-95
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The Terrible Permanence of Objects, and: The Origin of Longing, and: How the Mind Works
Harriet Brown
The Terrible Permanence of Objects
A curse, a curse
on the objects that remain –this necklace
your wedding gifteach pearl's face
iridescent and closedfrom a day when you
were still in the worldshining, my heart,
the string running through me.
The Origin of Longing
Her body's flush and swoon
set long agolike grooves carved
by an urgent needle [End Page 93]more brilliant than anything
that followed – bone, tears,the soft, stuttering cry
of a child's body –a shattering, sweet lightning
that wrote its nameon everything it touched,
reducing it to scratched waxon a hopeless track,
a broken recordwaiting for the prick
of the needle, the pause,the staticky, thrilling start
of the same old song.
How the Mind Works
Lapping and overlapping waves
crash and slap and leave behindmiles of trash and sand.
Slipping on surfaces, watchfor maps that lead somewhere else.
What happens is always happening [End Page 94]and happened – endless rapprochement
of past and present, stopgap,all covered over, uncovered
so many times only the oddbits show: an apple core,
a cardboard flap, a mysterypackage poking up, a hand.
What's buried: the boneof things, hard, unchanging,
impervious to rain and rot,no loose change but
the clap of something true.
...