[I want to write an honest sentence.]
I want to write an honest sentence. I want to write a sentence I can own, not in the way I own objects but how I take responsibility for the air inside my room, breathing as a form of attention that enters without staying. Nothing stays, though "it stay hot" denotes a change of condition. He who cannot own his failure tries for a better one, destruction without hope of renovation, a blackened high rise to remind us there's more to life than structure. Strictures bind us to our dog, who is pet inside the house and animal outside. Nasal appraisal, one neighbor calls it, nose to the grass, a way of reading in no particular direction, though leaves require particular energies to decipher. A swift intake of breath is not grammar or syntax, less an unfolding than a claim on the air that's instantly repaid. Her nose on my arm tickles, a greeting that is also inventory. Palm fronds shield us from the asphalt ribbon they put down on our field, the better to protect their golf carts from injury. A two cart parking lot adorns the front of the ever-growing shed. Cart Path Project, it's called. Black ribbon on a green field, no Barnett Newman that. Stations have not opened, though concrete ribbons run across the Leeward side. Look at the earth, my father would say, its rich reds or clays. I took to looking up instead, but age pulls us down a peg, pushes our eyeballs into what's left of the commons, pulls up fences like blue tape. The blue whale game, while horrifying, may prove to be a hoax. The girl painted blue whales, but her family had no idea she spoke Russian. Each one cuts a blade in our emotional skin, leaving a ribbon of blood behind our eyes. The Senator's surgery was more complicated than had been thought, so he couldn't get to DC in time to vote against others' health care. Irony prevention is what we need, with small co-pays. She teaches irony by showing her students a bus marked by a huge sign advertising safety, a bus that has just run into a car. The car resembles a crushed maroon paper flower, or the sculptured trash can a president throws his deed inside. "I will not own this," he says; he only owns what he destroys, the negative space charcoal is good at getting at. My daughter learned perspective last week; this week she's on to ceramics and soccer. I haven't seen monks play, but her passes sometimes defy physics. Space is time that's been thrown on a wheel.
Feature Date
- August 8, 2020
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Susan Tichy
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Copyright © 2019 by Susan M. Schultz
from “I Want to Write an Honest Sentece”
Talisman House, Publishers
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Susan M. Schultz has lived in Hawai`i since 1990. She is author of several books of poetic prose, including Dementia Blog and “She’s Welcome to Her Disease”: Dementia Blog Vol. 2 (Singing Horse Press); Memory Cards: Dōgen Series (Vagabond); Memory Cards: Simone Weil Series (Equipage, UK), and Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series (Talisman). Her virtual chapbook, The Viewpoint is Presumption (Poetry Dispatches) includes n+7s (and other numbers) of Trump tweets. She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry and wrote A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (both from University of Alabama Press). Schultz founded Tinfish Press in 1995 and edited it until 2019. She lives with her family, three cats and a dog, Lilith, in Kāne’ohe, on O`ahu, and is a life-long fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.
Northfield, Massachusetts
"The latest in Susan M. Schultz's ongoing, cumulative epic is as gorgeous, far out, and effective as anything she's written. I love her deep but lightly held learning, her big heart, and that she's quotidian and funny. Our great poet of grief, Schultz is the calm at the center of storms of sorrow, confusion, loss, politics. Her sentences are so good they can make you (me) cry: 'My response to the death of a poet is to imitate his sentences like Matt Morris throwing Darryl Kile's curve two days after Kile died. Style's a form of grieving, one that threads out like a shawl over bent shoulders.' This—like the whole book—has her distinctive smartness, precision, and just plain beautiful writing."
—Elinor Nauen
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