#qqq anne carson

[theydonotmove]

You know the second person in the history of the world the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara the first was Orpheus (me) You are my sweetheart said the Sun He was sitting on the hood of his truck Somehow it was

menacing I hardly knew what to say I got into the truck that strange autumn light sharpening all glass and harm my hands fell off The Sun got in beside me took my hands one by one blew into each finger filling it with a kind of sound

Gave my hands back to me

...

Tell you a story about the best poem I ever wrote the one I lost That page was terrific it slid out

of a dream about the littorals above Europe and me looking down as if As if on oceans I had all the answers I was an answer! I was high as day arising and truth shot out of me like a lark Years ago These are tears I do not use I lost the

page again and again found it again every time I moved finally captured it in a plastic sleeve put it on top of the TV A scrap of paper torn and brownish now some words just stain What does it mean the littorals above 

Europe? I never found out I look at it fast sometimes Hoping

I was I lost I sang I knew I ever look at that strange autumn light as a scrap of (me) off Eurydike torn Her number I lost her lark I shot and she off swimming History folded one twice her head gone among the stones crying Don’t play it again it was perfect

--Anne Carson, “Good Dog I”

[theydonotmove]

My mother-in-law is four feet nine. Embracing her, I feel big, bestial, slightly disloyal; my own mother, now deceased, was also small. Otherwise they are not alike, except for an opinion that I dress badly and am emotionally obscure, which they would have shared. That I ought to be taken somewhere to “shop for clothes” is a hovering threat. Tonight my mother-in-law and I are doing the dishes. It is Christmas night. We are in Ohio. Her name is Verna. She washes, I dry. The dishtowel, my last year’s Christmas gift to her, is printed with cartoon cameos of Bloomsbury celebrities. Verna is telling stories about Mildred, her best friend, who died. Mildred taught me everything I know, she says. Mildred taught me how to entertain. I am half-listening, thinking back to drying dishes for my own mother. I recall silence, distemper, and impotence on my part. I really wanted to talk to her, or hear her talk to me. All the same, I stood beside her at the sink night after night, year after year, in a blaze of shame lest she ask me an inside question or blurt out some entrail of her own. Fear of entrails governed us. We both had neurotic bowels. And a kind of continuing unfounded rage. So when I say “wanted to talk” it’s not quite true. I never wanted it at the time. I wanted it before, I wanted it after, I want it now, I never wanted it at the time. At the time was always the wrong time, and I was in a rage. Are other families like this? I know I’m setting the bar high, but I cannot imagine it was ever the wrong time to talk in, say, Bloomsbury. But then here is Virginia Woolf (from “A Sketch of the Past��): 'We are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality. . . .'   Was it Virginia Woolf who taught us to adore these floods of reality, without which we merely navigate a sea of convenience with other people? But here it is Christmas night in Ohio and a crack is beginning to show. I stand by my mother-in-law with a soggy dishtowel in hand, pondering the holiness of conversation. She is talking about her last glimpse of Mildred. A hospital room. Mildred, laid low by one of those cancers which kill you in a weekend, can no longer eat, is sucking on a piece of ice, has a tube up her nose, and when Verna leans over the bed to ask if there’s anything she can do, Mildred shoots her a look, moves the tube aside, and says, Verna, I’d give the world right now for one of your Martinis. The next day, Mildred is dead. My dishtowel by now a saturated oblong, I fold it in three, hoping for a new dry corner. So when did Mildred pass away? I ask, and Verna says, 1965. What is a mortal being? A wind, a dream, a shadow, the ancient Greek poets tell us, but I don’t say this to Verna. I merely repeat, 1965!, in disbelief. From the other room comes the sound of TV. It’s a Christmas special about war—they’re interviewing a soldier from some Army, I think Israeli, whose assignment is to show up at sites where a woman or a child has been killed and plant weapons on the body. I wring out my towel. Everything I want from a mother is entrail-exhausting, rage-flooded, shocked-alive, and structured like a shriek. All I have the courage to ask of her is this convenience. We wipe down the counter. We hang up towel and sponge. When I was little I understood the world to be made of paper, and that everyone should step carefully or go through the paper. I wanted a notation for that, for the going-through. I thought, I still think, this notation is stored somewhere, above us in a sort of mist or secret layer. I never realized Verna had been carrying the ghost of Mildred at the front of her mind for fifty years, like impossible antlers. The judgments we bring to bear on one another are not very sound, are they? Now Verna is scrubbing at spots on the stove with the hem of her apron. Come on, let’s watch TV, I say. I brought a movie. It’s Lubitsch—you’ll like it.

Anne Carson, “Trouble in Paradise”

[theydonotmove]

“Underwater is a different world—old and slow, unstartled and unstartlable. All bodies are beautiful there. They balance like big blue toys. Outlined in silver bubbles. Ideal motion. Who is not made happier by this motion? Beside the lap pool is a family pool that has shallow water and steps leading to a water feature at one end. This is a sort of hot tub where underwater jets create a circling current. She wonders how strong the jets are, wonders what it feels like, never gets around to trying it out. Then one day glancing over she sees six or seven people caught in a moment of total water-feature radiance, looking as surprised as if they’d burst into flame. It is evening. Loose light falls from high windows. Their faces are open and strange, their bodies aligned head to toe. It is carrying them all round in a single stream—every so often gazing down at their own arms and legs as if to say, Look at us, look, we turned out perfect after all! This is Being with a capital B, she thinks. She stands quite a while, watching.”

--Anne Carson, “1-866-mrtr”

[theydonotmove]

[theydonotmove]

Tell me. Have you ever seen woods so. Deep so. Every tree a word does your heart stop? Once I saw a cloud over Bolivia so deep. Mountains were cowering do you ever? Look in so quick you see the secret. Word inside the word? As in an abandoned railway car. One winter afternoon I saw. The word for "God's woods."

Town on the Way through God's Woods

[theydonotmove]

Hanging on the daylight black. As an overcoat with no man in it one cold bright. Noon the Demander was waiting for me.

“Bride Town”, Anne Carson

[theydonotmove]

The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light. . Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick . and hearts shut and fathers leave to go back to work and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering . something they never tell. You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. . Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

Anne Carson, “Glass Essay”

[theydonotmove]

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red