from "The Sorrows of an American" by Siri Hustvedt

Sonia left several messages for Inga. She turned on the television, and we absently watched as greatly magnified earwigs wandered across the screen and a male voice droned on about their marvels. Sonia was twisting her hair at an alarming rate, and after searching through hundreds of channels and finding nothing we considered even remotely entertaining, I asked her if she would consider reading her poem to me.
At first she balked, saying she couldn’t concentrate, that she was too nervous, but then she relented, and after explaining that she still was editing, that she wasn’t sure of every stanza, a very important one hadn’t been written yet, and that she had chosen  constrictive form in order to see if she could do it, she picked up a small sheaf of papers from the coffee table and began to read to me in a clear voice.

            Five years ago, I watched my father die.

            His vacant corpse had lost the man I knew,

            the man who used to sing a lullaby

            at night or tell me tales of Paradou,

            the little town where phantoms sob and sigh,

            their windy voices keening, calling to

            the ones they left behind. They frightened me,

            those spectral beings of eternity.

            Today, I’d like to face those ghosts again

            because I’ve understood the dead don’t grieve,

            the living do. Dear God, change now to then,

            I pray. Dear God, grant me one reprieve.

            Return me to the long-lost regimen

            I loved. One bedtime kiss and I’d believe

            my father knows the truth: the part I played

            required a stoic mask. Beneath, I was afraid.

            I cleared my throat. Genie and I had visited Max, Inga, and Sonia one summer in Paradou, a tiny town I Provence, not far from Les Baux. Where they had rented a house. I remember Max grinning in the candlelight that flickered on the table as we sat outside in the cool air. A cigarette between his teeth, smoke circling upward, he had raised his glass in a toast to the season, to the good life, to family.

            Sonia looked up at me, “You don’t hate it, do you?”

            While I was shaking my head, she continued, “It’s the same form as Byron’s Don Juan. These octaves are usually comic, you see, but I wanted to see if they could be serious.” She paused, and I thought of Mr. T.’s linguistic machinations and crazed rhymes. “There’s supposed to be one about September eleventh next, but I haven’t been able to write it. I’ve tried over and over again, but it’s too hard. Maybe I’ll just have a blank there – a nothing, a big empty spot with only the date.” Sonia looked at me, her expression suddenly fierce. “Then there’s these two.”

            They say the young don’t know mortality,

            but that’s all wrong. I feel it in my bones,

            my brain, my eyes, my limbs, in all of me,

            in dreaded things as well, like telephones

            that ring with news of fresh calamity,

            in sounds I hear before I sleep, the moans

            of disembodied voiced in my head,

            my own despairing echoes for the dead.

            Policemen came one day to search the roof,

            two long-faced men with gloves and plastic bags.

            They climbed the stairs in hope of finding proof

            that body parts still lay beneath the flags

            we flew before their meaning turned to spoof.

            I see him clearly still. He kneels and drags

            the tar, an officer whose empty eyes

            betray no hope, no sorrow, no surprise.
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Książkę wydało wydawnictwo Henry Holt and Co. w 2008 roku. 

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