Due rent

Jack Gilbert once said in a poem that the Lord gives everything, then takes it all back again, along with the woman (Linda Gregg), because the rent was too high for our psyches, and that whole memory recollected in tranquility thing bites us on the ass whenever we revisit the past. But it is also filled with bogs of quicksand, where the only rescue is of the self by the self. The easy way out is to not remember at all. So many friends find that memory has already eroded and slipped between the mossy cracks and steppingstones of regret. Things they were so positive they didn’t need to commit to memory—except for the early years. All those first loves, and deceptions, say, a long weekend with your lover, when you said you were with friends—and not where you said you’d be. Perhaps you got busted or tripped up on your own stories. Nothing like clandestine love among the ruins of a society so corrupt, you couldn’t imagine anyone even caring what you did, and with whom. This is all speculative fiction you know. There was no lost weekend, no hotel in Paris where you looked out the balcony toward a future that would never come. You were so impatient, and you could see the light on the horizon, that one that would never arrive, nor would it spin overhead with the wheedling stars. This was long before the corpse of poetry came to visit you. But you’ve never been to Paris, not on a Thursday, or even in the rain. Just those black lines, a deluge on the page, and you’re left wondering when and where the rent is due.

2/22/23 Write On! Terri Glass