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Claudia Keelan in Response to Donna de la Perrière

she was stepping outside us / one leg at a time

On Donna de la Perrière's “Reaping Wheel”

​

It begins endlessly to occur that elegy is approaching.
 
Who is gone cannot be known, has from first stranger to next stranger, passed.
 
The poet looks to origin to understand but she cannot understand, even here—on the page, which is the site of the poem’s incidence— and there, a locus, a hometown where it turns out, she can’t return.  “Reaping Wheel” evokes an erotics of absence, from it’s beginning where an “arrangement” is made that involves the poet looking and seeing that her stranger is “beautiful” from a “distance” but where she—by virtue of her own innate reticence—doesn’t “say anything.” In origin intention is always at least made of two—is it only that the poet won’t speak her love, or has she been ordered not to do so, by virtue of their arrangement? Or is it that third, ménage a trois, agreement by youth’s omission? Even in heaven, wounds are made, and the poet wants to heal the poem, herself, the stranger, with the right words but doesn’t: “I kept wanting to send it to you, but [] didn’t…” As a reaping wheel returns its harvest from the ground, memory returns its unforgettable moments only in the present, where love withheld can’t be given, where the past cannot be reconciled. The beloved is dead, and elegy must, as always, seek who is gone. “Reaping Wheel” is a cautionary tale, Shakespearian in it’s warning, i.e. “gather ye rosebuds while ye may!” Left in a perpetual “now, now” where she can but “wonder” that she “was not ready,” the harvest is reaped, and the erotics of absence are complete.

​

​Nearing Providence
 

​I saw her
 
 Step away from our body
 
Leaving me there on the wet ground.
 
She was stepping outside us
 
One leg at a time,
 
Taking me off with her pants.
 
Sweet Husk, Discrete Ghost
 
But it was me she was leaving
 
And it’s I who am a shade
 
 
The little boy drew tombstones engraved with writer’s names
 
“Shakespeer” “James Joyce”
 
And when he was a man
 
Slit his own throat
 
When our life was ending,
 
His mother picked weeds in my yard
 
Whispering at least he’s still alive
 
Pollen spreading across her palms
 
I’ve been taking off my pants
 
One leg one at a time
 
For more years now
 
See me lying there on the ground?
 
              
The boy’s mother is gone
 
A shade, I call for her across the weeds
 
On thee northern island
 
Where in providence
 
God is found
 
A man with a scar across his neck
 
Inscribes a funeral boat
 
 
Inside a golden bough
 
She is Carolingian
 
 
Home now in the desert
 
We step into the sea

Claudia Keelan is the author of seven books poetry, including Utopic (Alice James Books,) Missing Her (2009) from New Issues Press, and the verse-drama O, Heart recently published by Barrow Street in the spring of 2014. Truth of My Songs: The Poems of the Trobairitz is her first book of translations (Omnidawn 2015). Her honors include the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, and the Jerome Shestack prize from the American Poetry Review.  She teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is Director of Creative Writing programs and the editor of Interim. 

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