Excerpt From The Double Task
The Past
Always a carnival at midnight and the lights
of rides turning off one-by-one. Lingerers
moving slowly toward parked cars, then night
gives its dust back to the dry fields.
They drove out and parked in the cornfields.
In his back seat, they kissed and pressed
their bodies into one another. The wind, warm
and clotted with summer, razzed
through cornsilk. When he lifted himself over her,
when he entered her, stars came down
through his hair. Something swerved off-course,
spiraling-up like stray particles or whizzing by
like a fly—a departing world, she will come to believe,
that farm boy's world. Years later, walking under
evening clouds, silver-rimmed like those Turner
or Constable painted, clouds above country lanes
that curved into shadows, she lay down and slept
for an hour. A brook with a name like Nightingale
or Abington soothed her with its water-trapped
sweet-talk. Then she woke from her nap
and brushed her clothes as if nothing had happened,
but another world had swerved off and she
was no longer a part of it. Every hundred journey-miles
the past is halved by Ockham's Razor, now-grainy
images sheered once more, sliced thin as mica or forced
into shadows like thieves—so we keep going,
exchanging our present world for a new one—
a decision, an insight, but sometimes unwittingly,
as if the cosmos flipped over and we became someone
new. Wholly elsewhere, we resume our lives—
the trade invisible and simple, indivisible, absolute.
The Double Task. Copyright: University
of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA 01004