Reset Forty-Nine, Day One Hundred Forty-Nine

[rejectomorph]

Brain stopped up. Maybe it's because I hacked off my hair before my shower Saturday afternoon. Maybe the hair heard the scissors coming and burrowed deeper into my scalp to protect itself, minimize the damage to itself. Maybe it burrowed into my brain and clogged it. I don't know. I don't know anything. Maybe there were knowable things once, but those days, those things, are gone. All I know is all I do now is sit here feeling the cells die in my head. There's probably nothing to be done about it now, this late, this ended day, this night sputtering toward exhaustion. This stage of life. Perhaps my brain will unclog as I sleep (I tell myself, lying) and in the morning, or afternoon, whenever I wake up, things will be fine. Just ask the pigs flying overhead. They must know something.



Sunday Verse

A Myth of Innocence

by Louise Glück


One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks--
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even, sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—
she says them in rotation.
Death, husband, god, stranger.
Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not.