[Time Passes]

[Time Passes]


Imagine grief as a parenthetical,
all the hours and days of mourning
contained between two punctuation
marks, all the unmet expectations,
unconsummated love affairs, condensed
to two words, compressed between
two outstretched hands, raised in pain,
cupping your head to prevent suffering
from spilling out of your eyes
in a series of unending ellipses....


This poem started out as an exercise in writing with parenthetical statements in it. I failed in that regard! My writing process is circuitous (All Rising to a great place is by a winding stair-- Francis Bacon) and often images and lines from poetry or books that I have read take center stage for a while. Sometimes I like to riff off of them or throw in obscure references to obscure quotations. (The games that some writers like to play.)

I started thinking about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse which contains a haunting section late in the book entitled "Time Passes." Don't read further if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the book, though Woolf is not the author I would read for plot. (Wow, a triple negative.) In this section, we learn of the death of many main characters through a sentence or two that are always in brackets. She is writing BIG in which themes of DARKNESS and TIME are set up against the human and the inevitable brevity of our life on Earth. Rereading the section this morning, I was blown away at the beauty of her prose.

Another parenthetical story: I first read To the Lighthouse at Yale and had borrowed my ex's copy of the book. In that edition, the section "Time Passes" had its own page upon which the ex had scrawled something like "This is the part in which Andrew Ramsey dies." Well perhaps it is true that revenge is a dish best served cold.