| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
STUDY OF ABSENCES
Letitia Trent
(The Critical Poet)
1.
The burglars slit open Christmas gifts,
impatient as children. Appliances were ripped
from the walls so hastily cords trailed
from sockets with their wiry guts
frayed out, plastic skins burst.
I inspect the squares of grime where things once stood,
the bugs and dust are collected like shadows
cut loose from their substance.
2.
I hear my feet slapping solo
on the cold linoleum. Coffee settles in the press. I can’t drink
it without you, the effort echoes old paths of movement; coffee
to table to kitchen, hands from cutlery to your forehead,
to your slick hairline, to your sticky eyelids. My body
must learn new directions, break the old
deference your absence renders unnecessary.
I set a glass of milk down, and though alone,
cross my ankles at the knee.
I admit, you bent my bones into new angles,
and I cannot stand to break
the bad knits
and take the itch
of the body stitching
them straight again.
3.
As you walk away I watch you receding,
watch the dark nestle deep in your ribs and the dips
in your shoulders, watch it clamber over your back
and swathe your flesh like a sweater. Now
you are lost in the dark of distance.
All little movements echo the big ones.
Time is the shadow clawing up your ribcage,
it is static that blooms between us.
Judge Wayne Miller’s comment: “What I admire most in ‘Study of Absences’ is the poem’s control of image and metaphor. I’m especially drawn to the description of bugs and dust exposed from under now-stolen objects as ‘shadows / cut loose from their substance.’ We then move into a relatively straightforward lyrical meditation on loss, before, in the third section, the voice becomes more cerebral, imagistic and removed—as if the acuteness of loss itself is being lost. In this final section, I love how the shadows overtake the addressee (beloved?) even before he/she is out of sight. And then, the real discovery of the poem’s argument is in the last two lines: the ‘visual static’ that occurs between two distant people is not merely to be understood as distance, but as a visual reification of time. Whether or not I read a sort of fractured personal narrative into the progression of these three sections, that closing leap is surprising and haunting.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
2nd Place Winner, October 2003
