I Looked For A Light

I Looked For A Light

I sought out a light however pale

to shine through the breadth of

separation – a fragile subjectivity

it is an arbitrary vignette

a fusty bankrupt morning

cool-eyed & cold-blooded

a well-thumbed copy of Didion’s

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

burnt brown toast & stale coffee

deskbound at the kitchen table

lone & impervious

accents & idioms of an external exhale

pleading & preaching graceful pensées

a lax wager of uncompromised insight

I looked for a light

in order to see - to unpeel the mundane

& reveal the momentous

I looked for a light

                in an e.e. cummings poem

                in a suspenseful detective story               

                in a Jackson Pollack drip painting

                in a Vivian Maier snap-shot

I sought out a light

I pursued the gleam

to outrun the gloaming

**

Joan Didion is a brilliant observer, a powerful thinker, an exceptional writer and an iconic woman. I read ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ back in 2015 and just finished ‘Blue Nights’ – both books, honest and intensely personal, rich in texture, stark in description, potent in the punch they intended to throw.

I admire her, Joan Didion. Her work is brave. It is timeless. Emboldened. In these two skillfully articulated memoirs, with honesty and ache, she presents clear-eyed memories of her past, a portrait of a marriage and then the worrisome wonders of parenthood and growing old.

Joan Didion, in a very short period of time, lost her husband and partner, John Gregory Dunne, while Quintana, her only daughter lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. She too soon died.

She formed her thoughts and experiences into a profound meditation on mortality, twice. I cannot imagine what it must be to see your husband die at your kitchen table while worrying for your only child suffering mere blocks away in a hospital bed. And then, inevitably, all alone.

This woman has paid her dues. The title of one of her older books ‘We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live’ – aptly applies to her fate so many years later.

Joan Didion and I share the same birthday but her sentences are better.

In propinquity,

Nic