Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 122
- Language: English
- Date Published: May, 2023
- ISBN 978-1-953252-78-4
Excerpt
XXV
They say to those who fall ill or grieve for someone lost forever: Live for the day, live in the present, be a presence in your world.
I have no world. The only world is the world, and the world worlds as Herr Heidegger says.
Nor am I really present. Absence sounds about right.
From my friends.
From the life I used to lead.
Emptiness sounds about right.
Which is why I live in other people’s books. His or hers. Theirs. The pronouns have a newly acquired bounce. Some individuals are a They.
“Our experience of the present is ‘specious’ only in the sense that it cannot be measured by public or clock time. This is because it is not a unit of temporal flow. It is rather the point of organization for all experience of temporal flow.”
But “specious” sounds about right.
“Clock time” sounds about right.
I am a spider who cannot spin its web.
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Author
John Matthias has been publishing poetry, criticism, memoirs, plays, and translations since the appearance of his first book in 1970. He taught Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame for nearly fifty years and has been Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Among his recent books, Living with a Visionary takes its title from his New Yorker memoir about his wife Diana’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease that was widely read in 2021, while Some Words on Those Wars provides the social, military, and political context for “Kedging,” a long poem about her distinguished British family. That poem, in turn, leads directly to “The Scent of Smoke,” the first selection in the present book.
