Broken
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Description:
Broken
There should be some Marker, his son insists, some Permanence to the last bad decision his father ever made. Forget the fact that we live it, now we must add Concrete to the stacked square stone gun turret so I can stare at it through this window for these last remaining days... I suggested a clothes line, complete with a crucifix attached to the end, like one in an old graveyard I saw once during a twilight. Make it practical, I said, because I still need to get the laundry done... He left me with too much to do. I'm not callous, but this has been no fun. And my clothes dryer is still broken, pending repair. He did this closest to the door of my laundry room, near a screen of bamboo. He did this in my driveway. I see it pulling up to come "home," and I see it when I go to my bathroom or wash my clothes. I still find pieces to pick up and collect in my box after every hard rain. A memorial to this action. A goddamn Marker to commemorate that last day... Perhaps I am callous, but the only difference between a cross and a clothesline is that the clothesline proves useful sometimes, especially when your dryer is still broken, pending repair. |
Submitted on 2010-11-22 02:29:41 Terms of Service / Copyright Rules
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| i'll never be as eloquent as em, but i read this a couple of times yesterday and started writing and erasing thoughts and then left leaving nothing... someone told me once that you never really stop grieving, it's just that you learn to live with it better over time. i remember ironing once, and i looked out the window and saw a gold finch. it immediately reminded me of my aunt who had died some years before. it was such a left field outta the blue kinda thing. and there i was, ironing and crying, thinking about my aunt who i loved and still love to this day. the only thing tragic about her death really, is that she was only 56 and was leaving her two kids parentless in their 20's. (their father died when he was 42). (my age). she died at home with her bestest dog on her bed and with people she loved and who loved her back. i think you have done well to mention the dryer not once, but twice here. because everyone has a breaking point. like a - how much more do you think i can possibly endure kinda thing. i mean how much more???? it's like a shoe lace breaking, when everything else has gone awry and totally sucks, but somehow you are able to manage to keep it together, but when that shoe lace breaks, you somehow fall apart in bits and pieces. and how the hell am i supposed to walk now???? i know what the feeling is like when a clothes line feels more practical than God for other reasons of course. but then i tend to think God is a funny duck and would say something smartass like: but you have a line to hang clothes on. honestly, there is nothing worse than laundry mats. | Posted on 2010-11-23 00:00:00 | by isabella | [ Reply to This ] | Sorrow can so often be eclipsed by distortion and a certain focusing-elsewhere, and maybe this is the way we survive, though inevitably it comes back to sorrow. | The grief here is honest and human. Not played up or down, but as is, a personal grieving process -- the broken dryer making it all the more (un)bearable. And the clothesline crucifix made me think of Mina Loy's "Christ on a Clothesline" -- not sure if the reference was intended, so if not: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/blog/archive/Loy.html and a song, just to be really evil: And I'm stuck now because I don't want to use the poet-critique jargon of "effective" and "emotionally wrought" and all that, even though it is all that. So: I hope that, at the very least, the dryer gets fixed (I would say: That nothing else breaks, but that's just asking too much). -Emeya | Posted on 2010-11-23 00:00:00 | by Lady of Shalott | [ Reply to This ] | |
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