| o prolong now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong |
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Certain moments will never change nor stop being - My mother's face all smiles, all wrinkles soon; The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen; Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune - All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other. That red-haired girl with wide mouth - Eleanor - Forgotten thirty years - her freckled shoulders, hands. The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit, Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery's, a small caught bird - Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward. O marvellous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton! And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky, Time a bow bent with his certain failure. Dusks, dawns; waves; the end of songs. . . --Donald Justice "Thinking About the Past". I found reference to this work on this page that reprints his "There is a gold light in certain old paintings" - something I saw in the New Yorker in the 90s and has stuck with me ever since, with the title, and stunning lines like "Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. / With so much to look forward to he looked back." and "I say the song went this way: O prolong / Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong." |
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