What does it mean to want an age-old call for change not to change
and yet, also, to feel bullied by the call to change?
How is a call to change named shame, named penance, named chastisement?
How does one say
what if
without reproach? The root
of chastise is to make pure. The impossibility of that—is that what repels and not
the call for change?
ii
There is resignation in my voice when I say I feel myself slowing down, gauging like a machine the levels of my response. I remain within so sore I think there is no other way than release—
so I ask questions like I know how in the loneliness of my questioning. What's still is true; there isn't even a tremor when one is this historied out.
I could build a container to carry this being, a container to hold all, though we were never about completeness; we were never to be whole.
I stand in your considered thoughts also broken, also unknown, extending one sentence—here, I am here. As I've known you, as I'll never know you,
I am here. Whatever is being expressed, what if, I am here awaiting, waiting for you
in the what if, in the questions, in the conditionals, in the imperatives—what if.
iii
What if over tea, what if on our walks, what if in the long yawn of the fog, what if in the long middle of the wait, what if in the passage, in the what if that carries us each day into seasons, what if in the renewed resilience, what if in the endlessness, what if in a lifetime of conversations, what if in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?
iv
What if you are responsible to saving more than to changing?
What if you're the destruction coursing beneath your language of savior? Is that, too, not fucked up?
You say, if other white people had not . . . or if it seemed like not enough . . . I would have . . .
What if—the repetitive call of what if—is only considered repetitive when what if leaves my lips, when what if is uttered by the unheard, and what if
what if is the cement of insistence when you insist what if this is.
v
What is it we want to keep conscious, to stay known, even as we say, each in our own way, I so love I know I shrink I'm asked I'm also I react I smell I feel I think I've been told I remember I see I didn't I thought I felt I failed I suspect I was doing I'm sure I read I needed I wouldn't I was I should've I felt I could've I never I'm sure I ask . . .
You say and I say but what is it we are telling, what is it
we are wanting to know about here?
vi
What if what I want from you is new, newly made a new sentence in response to all my questions,
a swerve in our relation and the words that carry us, the care that carries. I am here, without the shrug, attempting to understand how what I want and what I want from you run parallel—
"For most of my life illness has made walking difficult. Take a moment to imagine your daily round. Reduce your range to half a mile, clip that to a 150 yards – how is your world now? Does it feel whole? What would you miss most? What could you do to remedy the feelings of loss?"
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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."
