J U N E 1 9 9 2 ![]() GRATITUDEby Jessica Hornik | |||||||||||||
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Learn to be grateful for armchairs, where you fit like a nut in its shell. Consider that plum blossoms happen twice: once in the vase, once as shadow. And these double windows and quadruple doors -- all have been constructed to slow the passage of air, feet, time. You come through in the morning and by afternoon, the day is something: a shadow's inches, a stanza, an emptied coffee cup. And things have their correspondences: Cézanne's boy always walks toward you like the future. The chairs' foreheads gentle the clamor of unobserved cells in a room -- as the face of your beloved answers for all of you. Between the eye and its sighted object a chronicle of personality takes place. All you need to know about me is I love the piled-on rectangles of a room, a window admitting the hill's diagonal, birches' white strokes on a green band. Nearsighted eyes arrange the page at a slant, which the heart interprets as stairs. Jessica Hornik is a poet whose work has appeared in Poetry,The Yale Review,andThe New Republic. Copyright © 1992 by Jessica Hornik. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; June 1992; Gratitude; Volume 269, No. 6; page 86. |
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