We Interrupt This Program

I know I promised a bit of homegrown analysis on the Verona Apartments issue this morning, but it will have to wait. I just read this morning's post by HowChow, and you need to, too.

This poem immediately came to mind. (from the poem, A Happy Childhood, by William Matthews)

It turns out you are the story of your childhood

and you’re under constant revision,

like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks

are all the selves you’ve been, lifelong,

shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk.

And each of these selves had a childhood

it traded for love and grudged to give away,

now lost irretrievably, in storage

like a set of dishes from which no food,

no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard

sauce, nor even a single raspberry,

can be eaten until the afterlife,

which is only childhood in its last

disguise, all radiance or all humiliation,

and so it is forfeit a final time.

In fact it was awful, you think, or why

should the piecework of grief be endless?

Only because death is, and likewise loss,

which is not awful, but only breathtaking.

There’s no truth about your childhood,

though there’s a story, yours to tend,

like a fire or garden. Make it a good one,

since you’ll have to live it out, and all

its revisions, so long as you all shall live,

for they shall be gathered to your deathbed,

and they’ll have known to what you and they

would come, and this one time they’ll weep for you.

***

"...why should the piecework of grief be endless? Only because death is, and likewise loss, which is not awful, but only breathtaking."

All Hallows Eve, 2013

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