My choice for this week's Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Damn-Well-Please is not a poem per se, but an excerpt from
The World to Come by Dara Horn. I find it rhythmic and gorgeous and heartbreaking--everything I love in a poem. And who's to say it's not?
"There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightening night when the sounds of the nighttime outside our drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself ever becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear--a tiny rehearsal, though you do not yet know it, of what will eventually happen for good--time holds still, and you can feel, through your closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time" (118).
And a second excerpt from the same book, thrown in for good measure:
"Of course, beyond the cave stood an entire world of years. Indigo years, yellow years, orange years, years that blossomed like roses and years that froze like snow and years that dissolved like sand, weeks that rooted themselves and grew and rose and towered out of the earth, and months and months of hard pebble days that bit into sensitive soles and callused them for good. There were times Sara could never have dreamed of--looming pink cliffs of seasons that had to be scaled on their faces or climbed on treacherous paths, roaring iridescent cataracts of entire decades thrown over the edge, vague yellow dunes of sleeping hours, sudden eclipses of nightmares. A few weeks were hard shining apples, or thick bread. One year, her first, was pure white milk. And there were tiny instants, fractions of a second--glances, touches, kisses, sounds, words--that flooded over the time around them, raging, surging with churning currents, and washing entire years away" (246).
