Following the Road
by Larry Smith from A River Remains. © Word Tech Editions, 2006.
I have left my wife at the airport,
flying out to help our daughter
whose baby will not eat.
And I am driving on to Kent
to hear some poets read tonight.
I don’t know what to do with myself
when she leaves me like this.
An old friend has decided to
end our friendship. Another
is breaking it off with his wife.
I don’t know what to say
to any of this—Life’s hard.
And I say it aloud to myself,
Living is hard, and drive further
into the darkness, my headlights
only going so far.
I sense my own tense breath, this fear
we call stress, making it something else;
hiding from all that is real.
As I glide past Twin Lakes,
flat bodies of water under stars,
I hold the wheel gently, slowing my
body to the road, and know again that
this is just living, not a trauma
nor dying, but a lingering pain
reminding us that we are alive.
This fear we call stress
I grew up with the slow groaning rafters of domestic despair, the only home I knew. But also with the lessons that it was rude to complain about anything. So things were, no matter how difficult, “not so bad”. Stress hadn’t been invented. Either you were alive and feeling it, and all the wordless sensation that leaned you towards any sort of “outburst” well that was just part of life; or you were dead and nobody would say anything bad about you.
Maybe you will enjoy this little interview:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2712214/rachel-cusk
Thank you! Yes I found it very interesting. Also the fact that she sees the loss of subjectivity (due to trauma) as generating “assumptions” of shared being. I have noticed the same thing but always considered it the falling away of obstruction, the opening of awareness, rather than another distortion of reality. Sitting at a blank wall for thirty years has not been traumatic but that could be argued. Hmm. I will have to try to find her books. 🙂
“Transit” is a sequel to “Outline”, but can also be read alone – personally I much prefer “Transit”.
🙂