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| Excerpts > Spring 2004 |
Nancy Esposito What There Is What There Is From the garden I heard laughter through the window, glanced up, opaque, and thought, laughter is good, my afternoon unmemorably silent. Yanking out ailanthus saplings, I remembered how you pulled out of me and filled the alley-lit room with two lines from Rodgers and Hart, I laughing, missing end rhymes to songs I thought genetic. By morning, you were avowing the ascetic, familiar show-tune finale of denial. Early evening and insects rising from the foliage, spangling my bare arms and overalls. In Great Meadows once, I was encased at dusk in mayflies. Tiny life, wings perfectly diaphanous, alive merely a day and a night. It seemed a tease, much like you, this blueprint without mouth parts, digestive tract, a fillip of what I've known of pleasure, and proof enough of neither justice nor mercy nor any other mythy thing I've ever wanted proof of. Even something loathsome as pity. As though I'd learned an intimate and terrible fact about a dear friend, life without moment, like the one I still retain of the taste and smell and syntax of you, the abrasions and collisions that threatened the very next day. And something next to what, I gather, happiness must be, a canal to memory, not opaque and impassable, even non- existent in which nothing at all could or did occur.
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