Excerpt from The Quick of It

because the body stops here because you can only reach out so far because the pointed blade of the headache maps the landscape inside the skull and the rising peaks with their roots behind your eyes their summits among the wrinkle of your brow because the sweat comes weeping from your hands and knotted nipples because your tears keep kissing your cheek and your cheek feels the tip of another’s tongue testing your tears because the feel of a beard along the back of a neck is enough to melt the windows in a little room because the toes the thighs the eyes the penis the vagina and the heart are what they are and they are (orphan, bride, pheasant or fox, freshwater glintfish of simple touch) we have to be at home here no matter what no matter what the shivering belly says or the dry-salted larynx no mater the frantic pulse no matter what happens


See what the dust does when the sun—just risen for its last lap—raddles it
Through and through. It glows. It’s a million mullion-bits of radiance
Blinding him to all the ordinary stuff, to trees and passing traffic, even

To his child leaving for school, her mother disappearing in a haze of blue
Through the hall-door, the cats in their cave of sleep, middens of Christmas
Gifts in corners, dishes in the sink. There’s nothing to be seen of any of it.

Once these dust brilliants become the living world and all he knows is
Torched, scorched to ash-scald by this apparition, though all can still make
Good, make estimable sense. But nothing (livid quick bliss it signals)

Strikes home as the dust does—leaving him deaf, dumb, blind, bedazzled.


All his life, we’re told, Chardin struggled to overcome his lack of natural talent,
So I begin to look again at his olives and peaches, at that cut-open cantaloupe
With its orange innards on show, or that orange from Seville he kept giving
A bit part to—to burn softly in its given space, to weight the picture in a newly
Luminous way.
                       Or how the dead rabbit’s fur is a dry gleam of white at the heart
Of warm browns, or the way each feather in the dead red partridge is a live thing—
The bird’s life stilled to this final exposure of itself.
                                                                          The struggle you see is with
The facts themselves, and with some knowledge he kept hidden from our eyes, some
Unspoken sense of how there these bodies are, and nothing can say it the way it is—

Only you look again, stretch your hand, dip the bristles, risk again the failing stroke.

From The Quick of It. Copyright 2005 by Eamon Grennan. All rights reserved.