- “When It Is Over It Will Be Over”, and Saturdays at Reynolds Work Release
“When It Is Over It Will Be Over”
after a pen and ink drawing by Troy Passey
of a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Hurricane of what must be only feeling, this painting’ssentence circling to black
on blank, ever- tightening spiralof words collapsing
to their true gesture: meaning what we readwhen not reading,
as the canvas buckles in the damp: freckledlike the someone
I once left sleeping in a hotel room to swimthe coast’s cold shoals, fine veils
of sand kicked up by waves where I found myself enclosedin light: sudden: bright
tunnel of minnows like scatterings ofdiamond, seed pearl whorled
in the same thoughtless thoughtaround me: one column of scale [End Page 38]
turning at a moment’s decision, a gesture Iwas inside or out
of, not touching but moving inaccord with them: they
would not wait for me, thickening then breaking apart as I slidinside, reading me
for threat or flight by the lift of my arm, as allthey needed to know
of me was in the movement: as all this sentencebreaks down to O’s and I’s,
the remnants of someone’s desires or mine so thatno matter if I return
to that cold coast, they will never be there: the minnowsin their bright spiraling
first through sight, then through memory,the barest
shudderings of sense: O and Iparting the mouth with a cry
that contains— but doesn’t need—any meaning. [End Page 39]
Saturdays at Reynolds Work Release
I remember never being afraid because they saidthe crimes they’d committed were small,because when they locked each man alonein the room with me—nineteen, thin as a childbeside the smallest of them—with their booksand pads of paper and sharpened pencils, onlya tiny window that looked out into the hallwhere no guard stood, I could see
the boredom and the shyness on their faces, these menfresh from prison but still waitingin one building, in Pioneer Square, in Seattle, in winter
where every Saturday it rained, a factwe hardly saw ourselves but heardin the drumming against the roof’s beams and in the wetsqueak of someone’s soles down the hall
where I would teach them wordsthey would or would not use, going overwith one man, who was twenty-five but readas well as a fourth grader, pages of Genesisso he could learn the terms
firmament and plenitude; his agate eyesflicking over pages that lookedrecently unearthed: phrases to be practicedat his new job, which was to drive a forkliftfor Weyerheauser, because it was the Bible
he wanted first, as another man wanted LouisL’Amour and a third asked for the back issues of Timemagazine someone left in AA on the chairs. And it was
not frightening, no, not even when one man saidhe’d made tapes of letters that he would send me, recordingsof his thoughts that spooled in the dark in the newdormitory where he couldn’t sleep, its locked doors [End Page 40]
but open windows, the insomniac moonpeering in on the skinny desk clerk who checked himin or out, who called the C.O. if he misseda meeting, learning to movefrom bed to work to group to lights out, but notto outside the building to stand aloneand smoke a cigarette. And what did he feel
those nights, listening to the rain a wall away,the cars that drove by in the dark, each steeredby someone smoking, singing, driving until morning
came with its cramped room, its yellow books to stutter over:firmament, the men spelled out, plenitude, gunslinger,
working until the locked door rattled openand I got up because it was time for meto leave, the sounds of cafés and movie theaterswelling up behind me. So close,I told them, when they got a word
less wrong, as if disciplinemade...