total things known

Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to excerpt an epic, and then I excerpt an epic anyway. This time, I am even giving you the end instead of the beginning or the middle, which makes the whole excerpting an epic thing even worse, but sometimes...well. Sometimes I have to listen to what my heart tells me about poetry.


Flour powders the air around them and settles on their arms and eyes and hair.

-----

One man shapes the dough,
the other two shovel it on long handles into a square hole filled with flames
cut into the back wall.
Herakles and Ancash and Geryon have stopped outside the bakery to stare
at the hole of fire.
After quarreling all day they went out to walk the dark streets of Jucu.
It is a starless windless midnight.
Cold drills up from the ancient rocks below. Geryon walks behind the others.
Little spurts of acid
keep filling his mouth from two red pepper tamales eaten fast a few hours ago.
They are following the palisade.
Pass down an alley then turn a corner and there it is. Volcano in a wall.
Do you see that, says Ancash.
Beautiful, Herakles breathes out. He is looking at the men.
I mean the fire, says Ancash.
Herakles grins in the dark. Ancash watches the flames.
We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back.

~Anne Carson (b. 1950), 'XLVII. The Flashes In Which A Man Possesses Himself', from Autobiography of Red, 1999. Now go read the whole poem -- novel -- whatever. I don't think reading the last part first will ruin it for you. It's not the kind of thing you can spoil.

I wrote a lot, today, and took a long and really lovely mid-afternoon coffee break with Penny, who, to my very good fortune, was in London and at loose ends. I left the library around 7:30, and walked through Bloomsbury at dusk on my way to pick up a few things at Senate House, and I couldn't really stop smiling. The writing comes, even if it comes slowly, and though this is a long week, and work-filled, and intense, I can't find it in myself to be overly stressed; I am too busy glorying in moments.