Things That Cannot Be Compared (Dissonance I)

← v3n2, Fall 2004

After Sei Shonagon

When one has stopped loving someone, one feels that person has become someone else, even though he is the same person.

Substitute ghost. A question of mourning. Unable to mourn.

Red hour of the wolf. No sound except the whirr of fan blades above our borrowed bed, the silvery notes of my mother's wooden cuckoo. She believes it herald of my father's spirit. Each hour I hear it crow, bright cry rising from its mechanical throat like the freed breath of sleepers. It wakes me from my dream of her overlit kitchen, the negative space before the window where my father is not standing, transfixed by the egret, calling to me to Come, see! Where he does not wince as I join him, recoil from his kiss.

grief memory family nature

Susan Aizenberg

Susan Aizenberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Her poetry collection Muse from Southern Illinois University Press won the 2003 Levis Reading Prize and the 2003 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. A two-time winner of the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council (1997, 2000) she is also a recipient of the Nebraska Arts Council’s Distinguished Artist Fellowship (2003). Recent poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Provincetown Arts, and Maggid , and translations of several of her poems into Mandarin by Chinese poet Luye have recently appeared in the Chinese literary journals Poetry Forest and Chinese-Western Poetry. She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001).