I knew a man once whose grandfathers were preachers and whose sister was a beauty queen. He lives in Nebraska, and because of him I’ve stayed out of Nebraska for sixteen years. I thought the feeling might be there, and if I found it again— what marrows were sacrificed to it, as one offers the innermost parts to the gods!
And what more would we have burned.
Then I saw him in Georgia, at a conference for writers. We even touched—a forearm on a shoulder, a wrist across a back, like skeletons embracing. The feeling wasn’t in my body. Nor was it in his body or in the space between us. I was surprised, for I’d thought it might be, and I’d thought maybe I wanted it back. It was just that I’d never seen anything like it, what it made him do to his wife.
(It had been the first time for us both.)
Last night, I dreamt it was the last day of my life, and I was allowed one favor. When I asked it, the wife, that dark angel of generosity, said Yes. I was so grateful, I didn't touch him. I just lay there in the ecstasy of what was about to happen. In the morning he placed his arm across me very slowly and I knew, finally, that what had lasted in memory wasn't him, or what our bodies did, or what they would have done. It was a firstness that I thought I'd never find again—the firstness of it, which in the dream comes just before the firstness of death.
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"I was drawn, then as now, to the solitary human voice, raised in lament or longing. And the poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role. Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine."
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"In difference to the traditional lyric model, where any 'inconsistencies' make the artwork suspect, Martell argues that it is these very rifts that open the poem up, throw the reader into a 'real' of artistic encounter. I would say that Olsson’s book is a 'rifted' lyric. It’s a lyric but it goes on too long, it confuses who is reader and who is writer, who is angel and who is human. It even confuses the angel with a dress worn as a teenager."
