"their and my impossibilities"
Brautigan, Rouzeau, Edson, O'Hara, Atkins
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Valérie Rouzeau (tr. from French by Susan Wicks):
Paul Giamatti, “Le Café de Balzac”:
I loved the craft essay about Brautigan. As a teen, I came across him, and my interest in poetry and writing was launched. My old books of his, now browned with age and falling apart, I return to occasionally. His ‘watched over by machines of loving grace’ seems prescient in our current context.
The Material vs. the Spiritual
On the day when four men carry the taped boxes,
the chairs and tables, the knickknacks down
the steep driveway, pack two trucks and pilot them
through narrow streets to hoist and carry
each object into another house
and stack them in the empty corresponding rooms,
on the day I scurry from one house
to the other, driving my mother’s coffee table
to the storage locker with Larry’s mother’s china,
directing the movers as their shouts
echo up stairwells, down hallways,
while my knees ache and my feet swell,
on the day when there’s no hot water and I
can’t find the cups, a day when we decide
what to do with each half-full bottle,
the bent trowel, the button
that vaguely reminds me of something that’s been
missing it, several hundred scraps of paper
marked by my hand, a stray mothball or two,
it’s hard to believe in a life that exists
apart from this one, a transcendent glimmer
as elusive as the slit in the skinny shaft
of the needle, the needle itself buried
in a box whose label I can’t decipher,
can’t even think about
until I’ve found, somewhere,
the coffee.